


to the sound of trumpets

by arriviste



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Legal, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, M/M, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-27
Updated: 2013-06-22
Packaged: 2017-12-09 14:51:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 47,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/775458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn't <i>only</i> quixotism that led him to walk through the doors of <i>Enjolras, Combeferre et Courfeyrac</i> instead of any other law firm in the country; he'd done some research of his own, and they're good. That they're not as profitable as they could be is a matter of principle, not ability. In anyone else, Grantaire would scoff at that excuse, but he knows them, and he's not surprised – or at least, he's only surprised they take on any paying clients, rather than operating purely as a non-profit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Grantaire has always thought that Courfeyrac looks vaguely hilarious in a suit. In college the suits were deliberately and ironically awful; in law school they were just slightly ill-fitting. Grantaire had fallen out of regular contact with Courfeyrac by the time he was an associate and the suits were becoming flashy and fashionable, so Courfeyrac the established lawyer and named partner is a revelation and a fracture in the established narrative: he looks _good_.

Great, really, and his suit jacket does things to his shoulders that should probably be illegal under the strictest definition of the law. Grantaire tells Courfeyrac this and Courfeyrac leans back in his chair and grins at him tolerantly.

The tolerance is another difference. Grantaire has been in his office for five minutes, catching up over whiskey, and he noticed the differences right away. In the intervening time, he's pretended to roll the whiskey around his palate like a regular nez, but instead he's been cataloguing the changes in Courfeyrac. Grantaire doesn't give a shit about single malt quality as long as it burns going down, but people interest him.

It's not as simple as Courfeyrac having grown up. He's as charming and witty as ever, but the impression of energy he broadcasts is different; less kinetic, and more latent. The difference is between the boy, alive and swept up in the process of becoming, and the man who has become, all his bright potential turned into banked power. 

“I'm happy you like my suit,” Courfeyrac says, and he does sound amused, “but I don't think my tailoring is the reason you ambushed my secretary and claimed my one o'clock. I don't think it was simply to renew acquaintances, either.”

“You don't know that,” Grantaire argues out of sheer contrarian habit. “Maybe I was walking down the street and I happened to pass your building, and, seeing that very fine brass plate reading _Enjolras, Combeferre et Courfeyrac,_ was overcome with nostalgic longing for the friends of my youth – _nostos algos_ , from the Greek, sickness for home, the state of absolutely physiological illness caused by separation from the once-familiar–”

“Take a breath, Grantaire–”

“-and plunged madly into the lobby, seeking the elevator to your floor like a salmon blindly swimming upstream, ready to spawn, like a, a narwhal wailing for its virgin–”

Courfeyrac cracks up. The chair tilts back upright and the tailoring of the suit suffers some crumpling. When he catches his breath he's grinning again, not tolerant but delighted. “I can't – there are so many jokes I could make right now, _so many_ , but Enjolras would find out, and he'd actually have my balls, they'd be gone, I'd be shopping for neuticles. I _missed_ your rants, R, you don't even know.”

Freud is a bitch, because when Grantaire was casting about wildly for similes, he didn't mean to say anything that could be construed the way Courfeyrac has construed it, even if making him choke on his Glenfiddich was almost worth it.

He's not here to build bridges or catch up. And he's definitely not here for Enjolras. He puts the glass of whiskey down carefully, and his hand only shakes a little. “I need a lawyer.”

-

Combeferre looks at him over the wire rims of his glasses, and unlike Courfeyrac, Combeferre is exactly the man Grantaire remembers. Older, of course, a little more worn, but himself: intelligent and kind in equal measure.

Combeferre's office is smaller than Courfeyrac's, although that could be an illusion; Courfeyrac's is open to the sky, all glass, while Combeferre's walls are lined with bookshelves, stacked with leather-bound tomes of legal journals and case records. It's cosy and dark and old-fashioned, and Courfeyrac's insouciant seat on the corner of the desk seems more than usually disrespectful.

“It's not precisely the type of case we usually handle,” Combeferre says finally, and tidies the sheaf of paper Grantaire had handed him into a semblance of order. “I can offer you an opinion, with the caveat that I'm not your lawyer of record, but you'd be better off approaching a firm who specialises in intellectual property if you're serious about pursuing this case.”

“What Combeferre is too polite to say,” Courfeyrac breaks in, “is that we can't afford to take on any more pro bono work right now, because we're always over percentage anyway, and we need billable hours to keep us afloat in order to keep up with our pro bono. And our pro bono clients are ranked in order of need, and if you were, I don't know, on the hook for murder, we'd try and figure something out, but while your case is interesting, it's not–”

“Oh, I have _money_ ,” Grantaire says. “Money's not a problem.” He blinks. “You thought I came in here to scam you for free legal advice?”

Combeferre winces slightly, but Courfeyrac shrugs. “It's been a long time, R,” he says, “but back in college you were kind of a master when it came to scamming free _anything_. Alcohol, sure, first and foremost, but weed, food, rent, heat–” 

He ticks the items off on his fingertips, and Grantaire tries not to get pissed off. He knows he was a sponge back in those days, in both senses of the word. He had nothing and wasn't willing to work for anything; he'd given up, and only cared about subsisting, and about drinking enough to stop caring about even that. He thinks he's still, largely, the same person, but he's not eighteen _or_ twenty-two anymore, thank fuck, and he doesn't want to remember what it was like. He doesn't want to remember what he was like.

Coming into _Enjolras, Combeferre et Courfeyrac_ had seemed like a good idea when he started looking for independent counsel, and seeing Courfeyrac and Combeferre again had been warming, something he'd missed and was glad to find again, but it was stupid to hope that they remembered him with the same fondness that he remembered the ABC days. They'd been good, decent human beings who'd undoubtedly gone on to lead good, decent lives; he was a shambles who had somehow lucked his way into a strange sort of success, hoping that he could show up on their doorstep and let the gap between present and past blur out his past mistakes. 

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, digging his hands into his pockets. Fuck, he needs a cigarette. “You're not wrong at all, Courf, it's fine. Thanks for the advice, Combeferre, I'll look into some other firms, it's all good. Nice seeing you again, and all –”

Combeferre grabs his wrist when he reaches across the desk for his papers. Not roughly, but firmly. His neat hands look out of place against Grantaire's fraying coat sleeve, and okay, in retrospect, _possibly_ he should have dressed up before coming into _EC &C_. It's just not what Grantaire does, to the despair of his agents and the chagrin of his handlers, but fuck them, seriously, they're the reason he's even here, squirming in Combeferre's grasp.

“We're not doing so well that we can afford to let a paying client walk out our door,” Combeferre says, and the admission soothes Grantaire's embarrassment like milk after capsaicin. “Sit down, and if you're comfortable talking about finances, we'll consider taking your case.”

Grantaire thinks about asking whether Enjolras needs to be here for that decision – there are three named partners, surely they need a consensus? - but Combeferre and Courfeyrac don't mention him, so apparently a simple majority is enough, and anyway, it's not actually any of Grantaire's business: he's not here for Enjolras.

-

Grantaire's in his hotel room when Combeferre finally calls him back. It's bitterly cold and occasionally drizzling, but he's out on the balcony anywhere, smoking cigarette after cigarette and watching ash fall from his filter and flake off into the wind. He's smoking because otherwise he just doesn't know what the fuck to do with his hands; his fingers twitch incessantly with restlessness. Normally he'd have a paintbrush, a stick of charcoal, a pencil. But he's felt sick about painting for the last few weeks. He hasn't even been able to sketch without feeling ill. It's all a tangled knot of disgust that makes him feel like shit, but going into _EC &C_ has helped him breathe, a little. He's started to cut through that tangle, just acknowledging that something's wrong.

“'allo,” he says, wedging the phone between his ear and shoulder. He doesn't recognise the number, and while he's been ignoring calls lately, he's feeling reckless.

“Grantaire? It's Combeferre calling.”

“Mm.” He should probably say something more. “Everything okay?”

“We're taking your case,” Combeferre says, and he sounds warily positive. “After some research, we think there's significant merit to it, and it's entirely within probability that we could negotiate a reasonable settlement.”

Grantaire's cynical enough that he translates 'research' into 'looked into your personal liquidity', but whatever. This is what he wanted. It wasn't only quixotism that led him to walk through the doors of _EC &C_ instead of any other law firm in the country; he'd done some research of his own, and they're good. That they're not as profitable as they could be is a matter of principle, not ability. In anyone else, Grantaire would scoff at that excuse, but he knows them, and he's not surprised – or at least, he's only surprised they take on any paying clients, instead of operating purely as a non-profit. It's simply evidence of the slow corruption of idealism that he's been preaching since the ABC days: those living in a capitalist society will never succeed in freeing themselves from their context. 

They're doing better than most at adhering to their principles. That's enough.

“I don't want a _settlement_ ,” Grantaire begins, and Combeferre clears his throat.

“Don't dismiss anything out of hand,” he says. “In any event, this is something you need to discuss with the lawyer handling your case. We've discussed it, and–” He pauses. “We did consider assigning you to one of our associates, but after looking into the Patron-Minette consortium, I felt that your case required the clout and personal attention of one of the named partners. Courfeyrac and I have already taken on as many paying clients as we can manage, so–”

“You're not saying what I think you're saying,” Grantaire says in horror. “Combeferre – look, I swear, I'm grateful you're taking the case, I am, but that's a _horrifically_ bad idea. You're clever, you can't seriously think – if you think you're doing me a favour, you're not.”

“It's not a personal decision.” Combeferre says, and if it was Courfeyrac, Grantaire would never, ever accept that, but because it's Combeferre, he has to believe him. “It's not a favour or a punishment, it's an allocation that makes the most sense for us. Frankly, any new paying client would be allocated to Enjolras. His pro bono caseload is heavy, but his contribution to the bread-and-butter work that keeps us afloat is significantly – less.”

It's a punishment, all right, but it's not Grantaire who's being punished.

“I hate you,” he tells Combeferre sincerely.

“That's all right,” Combeferre says, mild as milk again. “I'm not your lawyer.”

It's completely possible that Grantaire has burnished the friends of his youth into icons of goodness in his memory that they never actually were. He doesn't remember Combeferre being such a dick. 

-

Grantaire smokes another two packs of cigarettes in the day and a half between Combeferre's call and his first appointment with Enjolras. On the morning of the appointment, he takes an incredibly thorough shower to try and shift the nicotine fug, and then has to face the quandary of what to wear.

Grantaire's not a total barbarian, so he does actually own a suit – well, he owns a blazer, and he owns a shirt, and his black jeans don't look too informal. He thinks. He feeds both the blazer and the shirt to the hotel room trouser-press, curses when they emerge from its maw with heavy rectangular creases, and tries to smooth them out with the weight of the cheap hotel bible. 

Then he decides that since he didn't dress up for Courfeyrac and Combeferre, there's no fucking reason he should dress up for Enjolras, so he loses the shirt in favour of a t-shirt that reads _collect moments not things_ , bought in a burst of black humour.

Then he thinks better of that, and puts the shirt and blazer back on. They've suffered from their time on the floor, but there's nothing Grantaire can do to fix it, and if he hovers in his room much longer, he'll never fucking manage to leave. 

He leaves two buttons unfastened as a final protest; they all fight the man in their own way, and this is Grantaire's.

-

_Enjolras, Combeferre et Courfeyrac_ really need better security. Just like a few days before, Grantaire manages to make it through the building lobby, up the elevator, and into their reception without challenge, and the front desk is empty, although a passing woman he pegs as a secretary, or possibly an associate, gives him a funny look. He’s not sure whether it’s due to a) incompetence, b) socialist idealism in action, or c) simple poverty.

Occam’s razor suggests a), but he knows them well enough to bet on b), or at least c) making a virtue out of necessity. 

It turns out that it isn’t only the named partners he knows. He’s hit by a human projectile while attempting to find Enjolras' office.

“Oh my god!” the projectile exclaims, helping Grantaire back to his feet and attempting to brush non-existent dust off his shoulder. “I'm so sorry, sir, can I hel– Oh my god!”

“Not knocking me over would be super, thanks,” Grantaire grouses, and then gets a good look as his assailant. He's not the type of person who yelps oh my god, himself, but he can understand the impulse. “Pontmercy? What the fuck is this, the one law firm to catch them all?”

Marius laughs. He's still freckled and handsome and floppy-haired, absurdly boyish-looking even though he must be over thirty now. Looking at him makes Grantaire feel as old and cynical as it ever has. How on earth does Marius convince people to take him seriously as an attorney?

“Oh, I haven't been here that long! Not since the beginning, I've only been here six months – this is amazing, does Courfeyrac know you're here? Does _Enjolras_?”

“I have an appointment with him right now, actually,” Grantaire says. “Lovely to see you, must catch up later – How's Cosette?”

Grantaire had been invited to the Pontmercy-Fauchelevent nuptials, and he'd sent his apologies and a crystal punchbowl he picked off their registry because it was the silliest and most useless item listed, and that had seemed to summarise his feelings on matrimony, wedding registries, and true love. He hadn't been in the best mood that summer.

Marius has always had an open face, and his stricken expression leaves Grantaire in no doubt that he's put his foot in it. “That's, um, complicated. Do you need me to show you to Enjolras's office? It can be a bit confusing back here, and we don't have many staff – oh, look, here it is. Enjolras?” 

Grantaire’s not ready, but Marius opens the door anyway without pausing to knock.

“He's not here,” Marius says, and checks his watch. “Was your appointment for two? He's not usually late, that's weird – Please, take a seat, and I'll go and find him.”

He's gone before Grantaire can demur, which leaves him debating whether Marius's sudden burst of helpfulness is due to the same puppy-like, eager-to-please nature that he'd had back in college, or the desire to escape a conversation about Cosette. 

It also leaves Grantaire alone in Enjolras's office.

It's just a room, somewhere on the spectrum between the glassy expanse of Courfeyrac's office and the library-like dim of Combeferre's. It's also a puzzle holding the answers to who Enjolras is now, the bookshelves and files holding the imprint of his mind, and the desk – surely? - some key to his personality.

Grantaire would have to be a saint in order to quash his curiosity, and no one's ever accused him of that. 

It's all boringly conventional and achingly virtuous – no whiskey stash in Enjolras' office – and surprisingly neat. He's briefly amused by the bust of Robespierre in pride of place on the desk surface, and doesn't know how to feel about the one, solitary framed photo. It shows an Enjolras looking no older than Grantaire last remembers him, looking scrubbed clean and delighted, shaking hands with some politician and giving one of his true, rare smiles. It can't have been taken long after he left for law school, or even before, back in college – Grantaire almost feels that if he tried, if his memory of that last year hadn't blurred like a watercolour held under a faucet, wasn't full of gaps and blackouts, he could probably place that occasion, remember why it had been so important to Enjolras.

He leaves the photo alone. There's little else on display for his amusement unless he decides to rummage in the desk drawers, which is where he has to draw the line, so he distracts himself with a rubber stamp. Pressed to the inkpad and then the back of his hand, it leaves the imprint of a perfect circle, a cartouche enclosing the words

_I certify this to be a true copy of the document shown and reported to me as the original_  
__/___/___,  
Citoyen et Avocat  
Enjolras, Combeferre & Courfeyrac 

Enjolras’s name is stark navy against his skin, like a tattoo; like a brand. Looking at it does something strange to Grantaire’s stomach. He really should have eaten breakfast, or grabbed coffee, or something. He needs another cigarette.

He’s busy trying to rub it off and mostly just smudging it into a formless blue blur when the door clicks open. Grantaire whirls around, feeling like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, a jumpy cat, something stupid and skittish and incredibly guilty, and freezes.


	2. Chapter 2

Enjolras is standing in the doorway, and he’s _beautiful_ , he’s beautiful in a way that’s like a punch to the solar plexus. There’s not enough air in Grantaire’s lungs, and that has nothing to do with the chain-smoking. Grantaire hadn't realised that he’d been afraid that Enjolras would be a disappointment, faded into someone less than the perfect boy he used to sketch during boring meetings of the ABC. He's older but somehow more beautiful, which doesn’t make any sense at all, as well as being simply not fair. 

Enjolras is wearing a frown and a classic suit that fits him flawlessly, simple black serge and white linen. His fair hair has been smoothed back, curls brushed out, which is a shame and a crime.

Grantaire wants to draw him. He wants to lick his shoes and measure his inseam with his teeth.

“What were you doing?” Enjolras asks irritably, and oh yes, apparently Grantaire still thrills to criticism delivered in that half-forgotten voice. Christ. He’s so fucked up, then and now and always, trained like Pavlov’s dog to roll over and expose his belly when he’s scolded.

“Nothing.” Automatic; weak.

“Don’t touch my things,” Enjolras says. “There are confidential papers, under attorney-client privilege-”

It’s just like the old days, only Enjolras is threatening him with legal measures instead of hanging. Grantaire wants to break into nervous laughter at the fact that after all this time, this is the conversation they’re having. Glorious first words. “I thought I was your client,” he says instead. “Aren’t you supposed to be my lawyer?”

“Under protest.”

Under scrutiny, there are patches of colour high on his cheekbones and the rims of his ears are red, the way they used to get during debates at the student union. Grantaire hasn’t said or done enough to cause this level of vexation – at least not yet – which suggests that either his mere presence is enough to set Enjolras off like a pot on the boil, or someone sent him in already all wound up. 

It’s not like him to be late for an appointment, Marius had said. “Have you been fighting with Combeferre? That’s an incredibly dumb thing to do, wow. He always wins when you lose your temper.”

“ _Combeferre and I do not fight,_ ” Enjolras says tightly. “We had a difference of opinion about how my time could be most valuably used, that's all. I think that it's qualitatively more important to use it to fight genuine injustice, and he seems to think that I should waste it trying to bail an old college acquaintance out of a mess he created when he sold himself to the highest corporate bidder.”

“Ouch,” Grantaire says, but oddly, he's not hurt. Enjolras is never this deliberately unkind to people he doesn't care about. His worst unkindnesses were always accidental, and they always burned the worse for being genuinely indifferent. “It's not super professional to accuse your clients of being capitalist whores, Enjolras. I'm beginning to see why your firm's not making bank.”

“This isn't going to work,” Enjolras says. “Get out of my office.”

“Fine,” Grantaire agrees, straightening up. “I wasn't too keen on working with you, either. I'll go see Combeferre, ask him if maybe Courf's free to take my case.”

It's almost funny to watch Enjolras struggle with temptation like Jacob wrestling with the angel, anger and relief and regret crossing his face in swift succession. Grantaire's mentally tossing a coin on the outcome – best two throws out of three? - when Enjolras says “No,” in a choked voice, and clears his throat. “That was unprofessional of me, you're right. We should begin again.”

“You sit down, I go out the door, knock and come in again?” Grantaire suggests. “Roleplay's a little kinkier than I bargained for, but I could get into it.”

“Don't be _stupid_.” Grantaire would be willing to swear, maybe even in a court of law, that Enjolras is grinding his perfect pearly teeth. He brushes past Grantaire and circles the desk, sitting down – straight-backed chair, there's a shock. “Let's just – Grantaire. It's good to see you again. I hear you have a contractual issue you're seeking our help with?”

If Enjolras can play, Grantaire definitely can. He throws himself into the client's chair, crossing one leg over the other, and beams. “Apollo! It's been years! How have you been? How are the kids? By which I mean Marius, because he doesn't seem to have aged a day. When did you start adopting underprivileged orphans?”

“Marius is hardly – shut up,” Enjolras says. He sighs. “Okay. I'm sorry I was snappish. It's not your fault that Combeferre and I are experiencing a difference of opinion over the direction of this firm. Can we be adults about this, please?”

Grantaire has _plenty_ of lines about adult fun he could throw in, but Enjolras looks genuinely strained, and it's not like they'll expire if they're not used immediately. He's not even entirely sure how he's gone from a nervous wreck to slipping back into the smartass habits of more than a decade ago, but making Enjolras mad is still totally his crack, turns out. Pavlov's dog performed for treats, but Grantaire dances for frowns and insults and dismissal.

“We can,” Grantaire allows. “Or you can. I can try. I'm not normally – look, I didn't come to you just to annoy you, I promise. I'm not – that was all a long, long time ago. I need some advice, and maybe some help, and anything you can do would be great. Would be appreciated, even.” 

“All right,” Enjolras says, and takes a tablet out of his desk. It opens with a flick of his fingertip, and then he's scrolling through something, brow furrowing again. “Combeferre sent me the information you gave him, but I'd like you to take me through it again, in greater detail. I'll try not to interrupt you too much, but some clarifying questions might be necessary. Are you okay with being recorded?”

Grantaire leers at him and is rewarded with another faint tightening of mouth. 

“All right,” Enjolras repeats. The tablet is set back down, replaced with a dictaphone and a yellow legal pad. Seriously old school, but it works for him; _oh baby, you're a classic,_ Grantaire hums in some distant chamber of his skull, _like a little black dress_ – 

The dictaphone clicks on, and he feels sick again.

There's a tape rolling and Enjolras, _Enjolras_ , of all people, after all this time, is sitting five feet away from him waiting to hear exactly how Grantaire managed to fuck up his life yet again. Maybe this time he'll give points for style? He might as well be asking Grantaire to strip naked under a bright harsh light, down past skin and muscle and bone to the rotten marrow. “I don't know if I can – you're going to judge me.”

“I'm your lawyer.” Enjolras says it like that means something profound to him. Grantaire can imagine him saying that, soothing and practiced, to dozens, hundreds of people, linking them to him in an inviolable golden bond of trust. It must feel like a lifeline to some of them, but it makes Grantaire feel even more like he's drowning. “Anything you tell me is covered under lawyer-client confidentiality and will not leave this room. Don't tell me anything incriminating beyond the necessary facts.”

“Christ, what do you think I've done? If stupidity was punishable, okay, but –” He really, really needs another cigarette. Or a drink. Fuck.

Enjolras turns the dictaphone off. “Grantaire,” he says calmly, waiting until Grantaire stops torturing his cuticles and looks across at him. “Forget any personal considerations. I promise, if I judge you, it will only be in the purest sense of the word.”

Grantaire wants to tell him that that's not exactly helpful or calming, but it is, somehow. Enjolras has weighed his worth and value as a person before and found him lacking, but Grantaire's had thirteen years to deal with that. That's nothing new. He's not going to dispute that judgment; he agreed with it then, and it's only a dull ache now. When it comes to the facts and merits of this narrative, he does trust Enjolras to weigh fairly and deliver judgment. Blind Justice, holding the scales in his hands and feeling the balance tip. 

“Okay,” he says, and Enjolras turns the dictaphone back on. 

He talks while Enjolras listens, occasionally scribbling notes on the legal pad that transform into some strange hieratic from Grantaire's angle. It's not a great story, and his first impulse is to broadly fudge the facts, make himself sound _slightly_ less pathetic, but that would be cheating. He falls back on the mostly unvarnished truth, raw and unsparing. There's no use concealing how fucked up he was when this whole thing began. It was a bad, horrible, shitty time, and he was an even poorer excuse for a decent or functioning human being than he was in that last year of college, than he is now.

He decides not to elaborate too much on those five lost years between college and his own personal deal with the devil. Enjolras doesn't comment or ask questions, and that's a small mercy.

“So I met this guy,” he says, and Enjolras's pen stops scratching. Grantaire looks at him under his eyelashes, and the pen starts moving again. “Montparnasse. It wasn't – he was in some of the same circles as I was, back then, but he was going somewhere. Most of that crowd had stopped caring, but he was full of plans and schemes and things, and I knew he was shady, but I _liked_ him. He hadn't given up. So when he looks at some of the old canvases I had lying around, and he says they're good, he can do something with them, I didn't mind. They weren't doing anything for me at the time, and if it helped him out – if he bought me a handle of vodka, I didn't care what he did.” Grantaire picks at the skin by his cuticles again, thinking about how to phrase the next bit. He should definitely edit some of the Montparnasse passages.

“He sold them, and he gave me some cash, which seemed like an excellent bonus, because I wasn't expecting anything. And he said, hey, if I buy you some supplies, how about you paint some more pictures, and I can sell them for you just like these, I'll be your agent.” Grantaire shrugs. “We did that for a few months, and I made a little money, and he must have made more. And then things changed. He disappeared for a while, and I wasn't expecting to see him again. But one day he shows up, months later, and he's wearing a suit, and he's part of Patron-Minette, which had just started up. You know, I'm not even sure what they do, exactly, but he wanted to become my agent, properly, through Patron-Minette. And there were papers, and I signed them.”

Enjolras makes the faintest sound, a hiss of exasperation through his teeth. 

“I'm not _completely_ stupid,” Grantaire says defensively. “I listened back in college, sometimes. I read the contract, but – I didn't care what the terms were, to be honest. I did have a lawyer,” he adds. “Patron-Minette paid for him, because I didn't have any money, but he wasn't from their in-house firm.”

“A lawyer paid for by the other contractual party–” Enjolras begins incredulously, and oh, Grantaire can just imagine the rest of the lecture. He's not sure how to explain that even if someone completely impartial had read it through and explained every clause in vocabulary so simple a child could understand it, even if his own time-travelling self had appeared before him to warn of Regrets Future, he still would have signed it, because he hadn't expected to be around to rue the day.

“So,” Grantaire says. “There were other contracts, later. We handled them the same way. Couldn't tell you exactly what those covered, but Patron-Minette handled all the stuff I didn't care about. At first it was straightforward sales, but then they started organising gallery showings and sales by auction, and it worked out pretty well, for most of the past eight years. I had enough money to live, and buy art supplies, and alcohol, and beyond that I didn't care. I might be a capitalist whore,” he adds bitterly, “but I don't actually give a fuck about money, beyond that. There was enough, and then there was more than enough, and that was okay.”

He takes a breath. “This whole thing – it's really not about the money. I knew I was only getting a fraction of the cut, but like I said, not the problem. I got an invite this year, though, from the Galeries de la ponte d'Arcole – which you don't know anything about, because the closest you get to art is that little tiddly plaster cast of the Incorruptible, but it's a big deal in the avant-garde scene. It meant something. I told Carmagnolet and Mardisoir – they took over the day-to-day with me from Montparnasse a while back, it's beneath him to deal directly with the assets now – and I thought they'd be happy. The next day, I get an email citing Patron-Minette's exclusive contractual rights to showing and selling my work, which seemed _stupid_ , so I tried to talk to Mardisoir about it. He didn't care. I got a meeting with Montparnasse, which took weeks, and he was charming, and then he pointed out that I'd signed a contract, and it wasn't in Patron-Minette's best interests to allow non-affiliated galleries to exhibit my work.

“I was pissed off, and it didn't seem to add up, so I started to look into some of the prices my stuff's been selling for, and it's just – it's fucking ridiculous. Way more than the cut I've been getting, which is not the point. I'm not being modest, but they're not worth that much. Their resale prices are way down from what they're getting at auction. I brought that up with Mardisoir, too – de nada. They won't let me see the contracts for myself, they won't let me see the sales paperwork, they won't let me show with the Galeries d'Arcole. I told Carmagnolet I was going to go ahead and show anyway, and made an appointment with my usual lawyer. He was very, very nice, and pointed out to me in very, very kind words that I had no options, and that if I breached Patron-Minette's exclusive rights I was on the hook for a completely fuck-off sum of money in damages, and then I realised he was singing from the company hymn-book.” 

Enjolras has been taking notes constantly, his blond head lowered and his hand moving furiously across the paper. It's not simple recording of the facts, Grantaire knows from watching Enjolras at debates and meetings, but rebuttals, possibilities, lines of thought. He may have started this meeting not taking Grantaire's problem seriously, but he's engrossed in it now. 

“You're the first outside firm that's done some 'research' on Patron-Minette and called me back for a second meeting,” Grantaire adds, and is rewarded with Enjolras' full attention. 

“Names,” he orders. Grantaire rattles them off – it's not a short list – and Enjolras jots them down. Then he asks for the names of every gallery Grantaire can remember Patron-Minette being associated with – a shorter list – and every buyer he's ever heard mentioned. Every fellow asset and every member of Patron-Minette. When he's done, he turns the dictaphone off, looks over the lists, nods, and flips back through the previous pages. 

“So,” Grantaire says. “It's – you agree that there's something wrong here, right? I don't want to be locked in like this anymore, but I'm not going mad? There's something going on. I know I'm getting fucked, but something smells, and I can't keep pretending it's okay and taking the money. I've acquired a conscience somewhere. Maybe you rubbed off on me.”

Enjolras grimaces reflexively. Grantaire definitely prefers getting that response when he's provoked it intentionally; Freud really is a complete and utter bitch. Trying to apologise would only make it worse, though.

“There's definitely a case,” Enjolras says. “The way they've handled this is outrageous, and this originating contract sounds overreaching. At the very, very least, we should be able to get you copies of everything you've signed in the next few days, and then we'll start working on the contracts themselves. Beyond that–” He taps the lists of names thoughtfully. “I'll take this to our investigator, and see what stones she turns over.” 

“You're a god,” Grantaire says fervently. “Thank you.” He pushes his chair back and stands up, and then hesitates. 

Enjolras stands up, too, and comes around the desk. He's holding out his hand. To shake. To say goodbye, because this is how civilised people conclude things, not with cold rage on one side and abject self-disgust on the other. 

Grantaire takes Enjolras's hand. It's the first time he's touched him in thirteen years. He keeps it professional – how do you shake hands professionally, anyway? Firm grip. No limpness. Mustn't sweat. “Look,” he starts, still gripping Enjolras's hand. He doesn't know where he's going, and tapers off awkwardly.

“It was good to see you again,” Enjolras says, and the surprise in his voice makes Grantaire snort and, finally, let go.

“It's more flattering when you sound less shocked,” he says. “It was good to see you too, Apollo. Thank you.”

Outside Enjolras's office, he starts shaking. Jesus. _Jesus_. Stumbling into Courfeyrac's office seems like a good plan. It's otherwise empty, save for Courfeyrac. 

“Thank fuck, you're not busy.”

“R, I'm working,” Courfeyrac says, but he closes his laptop. “How was it? Do you need to debrief?”

“I held his hand,” Grantaire says, throwing himself onto the leather sofa. “Well, I shook it. God, I wanted to punch him at first. How do you work with him every day and not punch him? Alcohol. It must be alcohol. Where's your scotch?”

“If I'd known you were going to be a frequent visitor, I would have never shared my stash,” Courfeyrac complains, but he's a good person, so he fishes around in his bottom drawer for the bottle, takes out the glasses and lines them up on the edge of his desk. He studies them, shakes his head, and gets up to hand Grantaire the bottle.

“I love you,” Grantaire tells him, cradling it to his chest. “Friend of my bosom. We've been parted too long. Shouldn't have let it be this long, but you had all that –” he gestures “– that baggage, human albatross around your neck.”

“Are you talking to me, or the whiskey? Can whiskey have an albatross arou– you're lucky I'm not telling Enjolras you called him that,” Courfeyrac says. “How was he? I'm not even looking for filthy details, I just need to know that he stopped being punchable and got on with the job.”

“He got on with the job.” Grantaire sighs. “He went all trust-worthy and serious. He's good. I mean, he's Enjolras, obviously he's good, but he's got that bonding with the proletariat thing down much better than he did back in college. Fuck him for being nice to me.”

“Yeah, it's terrible when he does that,” Courfeyrac agrees, the lightest edge of sardonic meaning in his voice. It _is_ terrible. Courfeyrac doesn't understand. It makes Grantaire feel all warm and hopeful, and that's painful, and it's stupid, because that's Enjolras making his clients feel secure. It's not personal. When it was personal, before the professional mask dropped down, Enjolras could barely stand to be in the same room as him, and Grantaire wanted to punch him, to fuck him on his desk, to _ruin_ his suit and his too-neat hair. When he's kind and professional, Grantaire wants to sit at his feet and lean against his knee like a pet. It's all bad, bad, bad.

He tells Courfeyrac that - “Bad, bad, _bad_ ,” - and Courfeyrac just shakes his head at him again. This is a terrible conversation to have. Grantaire should change it. “Marius!” he says. “What's he even doing here? I thought he was working as a public defender. Wasn't he working with his father-in-law? What's going on with that, anyway? What happened?”

“I have no fucking clue,” Courfeyrac says, accepting the change of subject. Grantaire missed this about him. Courfeyrac was always so willing to gossip. “I don't think Marius even knows what happened with Cosette. But yeah, he was a public defender – so was Enjolras until he started the firm up, before he got all disillusioned with the system – and when they separated, we had enough work that we needed an associate, and.” He shrugs. “Good timing.”

“Nepotism,” Grantaire corrects him. “Blatant, blatant favouritism.” He sits up a little, blessed with a happy thought. “Courf, are you _living together_? Did he just move out here and move right back in?”

“Fuck off,” Courfeyrac groans. “Yes, okay, but only until he finds a place, or fixes things with Cosette. Oh, come on, stop laughing – it's not like it's permanent, or like we've been rooming together since college without a break. He's _sad_ , R. He's pathetic. It would break your heart.”

“I'm sorry, it's just too funny,” Grantaire says. “I have no pity. You're living with your college roommate again. _Ne plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose_ , huh? Marius goes from one keeper to another to back again.”

He lies on the couch cackling and needling Courfeyrac until the whiskey is all gone, and then allows himself to be steered gently out of the building. The weather's disgusting again, and the freezing rain is harsh on his face. He can still feel Enjolras's fingertips on his skin like pinpoints of warmth.


	3. Chapter 3

He doesn't hear from Enjolras for several days, and his collection of missed calls from both numbers known (Carmagnolet, Mardisoir, Montparnasse; other familiar Patron-Minette flunkies) and mysteriously unknown has tripled, quadrupled, quintupled, sextupled. Grantaire's run out of tuples. They've probably figured out at this point that he's running. The fat is in the fire, the game is afoot, the dice are flying high; Grantaire could possibly even out of clichés before he runs out of adrenaline.

**enjolras@ECCcitoyensetadvocats.fr**

_Grantaire -_

_I've written to Patron-Minette's legal representation, asking for copies of your contracts. There's absolutely no excuse they can use to deny us copies, particularly since this correspondence can now be used against them if they attempt to enforce their rights over your work. They've sent me back a placating response asking for more time to find them, so I countered with a more strongly-worded letter. Mentioned that they'd paid for your lawyer at the time. I need you to clarify – did you ever receive copies of the contracts for your own records?_

_Enjolras_

 

**diogenes.in.darkness@gmail.com**

_don't remember, sorry. might have, but if i did i chucked them out a long time ago. wiped paintbrushes on them or something. does that matter? R_

 

**enjolras@ECCcitoyensetadvocats.fr**

_Grantaire -_

_No, but it would be helpful if you could remember precisely. I've already detailed their ethical breach in paying for your personal counsel at that time, but if they denied you private copies of any contracts, I could use that._

_Enjolras_

 

**diogenes.in.darkness@gmail.com**

_sorry, no clue. R_

 

**enjolras@ECCcitoyensetadvocats.fr**

_Grantaire -_

_Why can you only find the shift key at the end of your emails?_

_Enjolras_

 

**diogenes.in.darkness@gmail.com**

_why do you keep reminding me who i am and who you are? its not like i'd forget. R_

 

**enjolras@ECCcitoyensetadvocats.fr**

_Grantaire -_

_It's not like your memory's been very reliable so far. Don't email me unless it directly impacts your case._

_Enjolras_

 

**diogenes.in.darkness@gmail.com**

_YOU STARTED IT._

 

Grantaire doesn't hear anything more for another day. He was half-certain that Enjolras was ignoring him, but no, Phoebus Apollo was busy doing his actual job, and Grantaire continues to be a jealous moron. 

 

**enjolras@ECCcitoyensetadvocats.fr**

_Grantaire -_

_We've received copies of your contracts. Please come to my office at three tomorrow to discuss our next path of action._

_Enjolras_

-

“This way today,” Enjolras says when Grantaire taps on his door. There'd actually been someone sitting at the reception desk, a tow-headed young man who'd barely glanced at him before looking down at his phone again. Grantaire can't really imagine what the _point_ of him is, since apparently it's not welcoming clients. 

He follows Enjolras down another twisty corridor like an obedient duckling, and remarkably Enjolras doesn't use the opportunity to lead him off a cliff, or out the door. Instead, he ushers Grantaire to a room _EC &C_ probably call their conference room, for all its pokiness. There are approximately a million chairs around the large oval table, but almost no room to squeeze between chair-backs and wall. Possibly the only group who could successfully hold a meeting in this room would be a coven of anorexic cats.

Grantaire manages to keep this thought behind his teeth – wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles - and takes a seat in silence. Enjolras doesn't sit, but goes back out again, and when he comes back into the room he's not alone.

There's a woman behind him, her leather jacket at odds with her neat chignon and pencil skirt. She shuts the door noiselessly and takes a seat next to Enjolras, and it takes Grantaire several frowning moments to place her. 

Éponine is a long way from the tragic teenager Grantaire remembers. Back then she'd been painfully thin, her dark hair tangled and her huge black-velvet eyes smudged carelessly with kohl. One of his last memories of that final year before everything went hurtling into the wall is Éponine standing barefoot in the rain, face twisted with pain, cheap sundress soaked to her skin and clinging to every hollow and hipbone. 

He barely recognises her, except for the eyes. 

She crosses one leg over the other and looks at him across the table. Her gaze is level and assessing, and if he didn't remember that girl in the rain, he might be a little afraid of this poised, watchful woman.

“So.”

“Hi,” Grantaire corrects, because _so_ is not the way to greet an old friend after thirteen years. “Hey. Hello. How have you been, Grantaire? Fine, thank you, and yourself?”

“I'm doing well,” Éponine says.

“I can see that. Very, _very_ well,” Grantaire adds, appraising, and her dimple flashes. 

“You're not paying us for social niceties,” Enjolras says repressively. It's a fair point given his hourly billing rate, whose first instalment Grantaire's already paid with a serious wince, but still, _squashing._ “Mlle. Thénardier is the investigator I mentioned to you earlier. I've had her look into Patron-Minette and the names you gave me, and it seemed like a good idea to have her sit in on this meeting.”

“Combeferre suggested it, actually,” Éponine murmurs.

“Are you a babysitter or a chaperone?” Grantaire asks. “Or a, what do they call the third guy in the boxing ring, the one blowing the whistle?”

“ _Mlle. Thénardier_ has done valuable work for your case,” Enjolras interjects. The encouraging manner he'd donned like a cloak to coax Grantaire's story out of him has disappeared again; this is the real Enjolras, waspishly sharp and permanently exasperated with Grantaire's mere existence.

“Yeah, they've been calling me,” Grantaire says. He's let his phone run out of battery, and he sets it on the table now, screen dull. “They won't stop fucking calling since I met with you. They were calling once or twice a day before that, but they must have figured that I was drunk in a ditch or something. Now they're calling several times an _hour_.”

“They probably thought that you were unlikely to be in a position to cause any trouble,” Enjolras corrects, and looks at Éponine.

“I believe in some cases the law firms you approached were simply wary of getting involved with Patron-Minette,” Éponine says. “They've made a certain reputation for themselves. Others were more... actively contacted by a M. Claquesous, who suggested that taking you on as a client would be a very bad idea.” She looks at Enjolras and Enjolras looks back at her, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to read that subtext.

Grantaire squares his shoulders. “He's called you.”

“Grantaire,” Enjolras says in his reassuring client-whisperer voice. It's tragic that Grantaire never heard it directed at him until this week. It's equally tragic how it well it works on him. It's stupid, but he trusts Enjolras when he's like this. He loosens up a little, no longer bracing himself against a coming blow. “Claquesous contacted Combeferre when we were doing preliminary background. We decided after he contacted us that we'd be taking on your case. We're not going to drop it just because M. Claquesous asked nicely – which, in fact, he didn't.” He holds out his hand, and Grantaire stares at it dumbly.

It's a beautiful hand. Obviously. It would be a crime to create a man in every other way conformable to the classical canon of beauty, then give him clubbed thumbs or hangnails. Enjolras has long fingers, fine-grained skin, neat fingernails.

“Your _phone_ ,” Enjolras prompts, and Grantaire fumbles for it and shoves it at him. Enjolras examines it for a moment – Grantaire has no earthly clue what on earth he thinks he can deduce from it – and passes it along to Éponine, who cracks the case open with a fingernail, removes the SIM, and pockets it. 

“I'll write to them again requesting that they don't contact you except formally, through us,” Enjolras says. “If they try, Éponine will take care of it.” 

“Is that safe?” Grantaire doesn't mean to sound dubious of Éponine's ability, he really doesn't, but he's met Claquesous before. “I mean, he doesn't exactly fuck around. Not to imply anything, but –”

“Don't worry about me,” Éponine says. Grantaire shuts up, but he fully intends to bring it up with Enjolras later. 

“Right,” Enjolras says. He makes a note on his tablet, and then takes a folder out of his briefcase. It's manila and perfectly plain, and Grantaire doesn't understand why Enjolras is handing it to him like it's something holy.

He flicks through the documents inside, since Enjolras is watching him expectantly. Pages of close-typed legalese. It doesn't mean much to him, although he recognises them as copies of his contracts with Patron-Minette; more because of the signatures at the bottom, his own scrawled R, than from any real recall of their contents. A neat little record of blind stupidity and a little venal greed. He shrugs. “Isn't reading this what I'm paying you for?”

“You are,” Enjolras agrees, sharp as whiplash. “And I'm conversant with it, of course. I just thought you might appreciate having your own, personal copy.” _After all this effort,_ he doesn't say, but Grantaire hears it anyway. _After Patron-Minette did their level fucking best to stop you getting one_. It's not just a bundle of contracts, it's the key to Grantaire's freedom back in his hands, and oh look, he's fucked up again.

“Thanks,” he says, but Enjolras is already opening his own copy on his tablet, not looking at him. Éponine is, but Grantaire refuses to look back at her.

“I've been looking through it since they finally stopped stalling,” Enjolras says. The copy on his screen is marked with yellow highlighting and red boxes of marginalia. “The first step with any contract like this is looking for something – a loophole, a clause that the other side has broken, anything we can sue on. I was hoping that they'd have neglected something obvious, but I'm going to need to go through the provisions with you, clause by clause, and see if they're in breach in any particular. Don't worry,” he adds, although Grantaire hasn't said anything, hasn't moved his face, “even if we can't identify anything specific and sue to cancel it on those grounds, the punitive clause dealing with breaking the contract on your side is extremely high-handed, and I intend to challenge it.”

“I think I can step out for this part of the meeting,” Éponine says, standing. “I'm going to get coffee, since we don't exactly stretch to in-house catering. Play nice.”

Enjolras ignores her, and Grantaire waves his fingers at her over Enjolras's shoulder. It's not like Éponine needs to worry, though; Enjolras is resolutely, absolutely professional. By the time Éponine returns, Grantaire's brain feels rather like an orange that's been juiced and had every little bit of knowledge expertly extracted. All he has left is the macerated, pulpy remains, so he reaches pathetically for the latte Éponine hands him and burns his tongue on it.

“Ow, fuck,” he curses, but it comes out more like _owhh, fickh._

Enjolras gives him a sideways look, sipping carefully from his own cup and making scrawled notes on his notepad. “I think that's all for today,” he says. “I'll be in touch. Grantaire, where are you staying? I'd prefer it if it was somewhere Patron-Minette wasn't aware of.”

“Way ahead of you,” Grantaire assures him. “I have a hotel room. I might change hotels again, actually. Enjolras, this is–” He glances over at Éponine for some kind of secondary confirmation. “This is kind of ridiculous, right? No one does this over managing an artist. This is something else, right?”

Éponine gives him a fraction of a nod. Enjolras is more careful. “I'm not sure yet,” he says. “A little care won't hurt, though.”

“I'll to see Grantaire gets back to his hotel safely,” Éponine tells Enjolras. He looks like he wants to argue, but then he runs a hand through his hair – there is life in it yet, Grantaire notes with joy – and shrugs one shoulder. 

“Do you really think I need a bodyguard?” Grantaire asks, as soon as they're out of the building and definitely out of Enjolras's feline hearing.

“I think you need a keeper.”

That's not fair, especially as Éponine hasn't seen him in well over a decade. Grantaire tells her that with no little indignation.

“You haven't seen me in over a decade. I've seen you. I've been researching you since Combeferre asked me to look into your background.”

“What did you find?” Grantaire asks. “No, don't tell me. I don't want to know. Shit. What did you – did you tell Combeferre _everything_ you found, or might have found, which, by the way, I'm not confirming that there's anything to find, if you haven't found anything. Did Com– does Enjolras have, what did you tell Enjolras?”

“I told Combeferre what he needed to know to make an informed decision about taking you as a client,” Éponine says. “Nothing that didn't directly impact that. And he told Enjolras what Enjolras needed to know to do his job. Nothing more.”

“Which is less, right,” Grantaire says. “Less than what you told Combeferre in the first place. Less than what you know.”

Éponine shrugs. “I'm an investigator, Grantaire. I usually uncover more information than I can use, and if it's superfluous, I keep it to myself. And then I forget it.”

She walks with fast, brisk strides that Grantaire has to struggle out of his usual saunter to keep pace with, and she's not taking the route Grantaire used to get from his hotel to the neat building _EC &C_ have their offices in. Grantaire's not willing to bet that she doesn't know exactly where he's staying, but after another few blocks he clears his throat. “You're not lost, are you?”

“We're not going back to your hotel just yet,” Éponine says, and takes another corner. 

-

Where they're going is a dive bar, apparently. To do shots. 

“I feel bad now that we didn't keep in touch,” Grantaire tells her. “You're my kind of girl.”

“Just do the shot,” Éponine says, and downs hers without bothering with a chaser. Grantaire shrugs, licks the stripe of salt off the back of his hand, and does the shot. As soon as he sets his shot glass back on the bar and bites down on his chunk of lime, the bartender refills it, then Éponine's. Grantaire looks at Éponine, and she looks back.

They do the shots.

“So this is what's going to happen,” Éponine says, when they've got a third round poured and ready to go. “Enjolras handles the legal stuff. He's going to do his thing, write a scary lawyer's letter setting out exactly how badly he's going to fuck them up, and if they don't come to the negotiating table, he's going to take it to court and hit them up for costs. That's his job, and he's really fucking good at it. But Patron-Minette aren't just going to play by the rules, above the board, and you know that.”

“I know that,” Grantaire agrees. 

“This is your new phone,” Éponine says, reaching into her purse. It looks almost exactly like his last phone, but the contacts list is short and to the point: _Combeferre. Courfeyrac. Enjolras. Éponine_. “Don't give the number out. And if you need anything, you call me, or you call Enjolras. If you can't get either of us, call Combeferre. You should be able to figure out who to call in which situation.” 

If Grantaire didn't know Éponine, he might actually be a little afraid of her. She's ruthlessly competent. If he didn't know Éponine, he might even be a little turned on. “Why are we bothering with all this cloak and dagger bullshit, though? I don't want to talk to Patron-Minette, I don't want to deal with anymore of their crap, I get that, but you're talking about them like – seriously, what's going on? Why do they care so much?”

“We're not completely sure yet,” Éponine says. “When you need to know, I'll tell you.” She gestures down at the bar .

Grantaire does his shot obediently, and tries to think about what to say, since the Patron-Minette angle's been shut down hard. He can hardly bring up the time he saw Éponine crying in the rain, but it's the only time he was ever truly that close to her; before that, she was someone Marius knew, and Marius was just Courfeyrac's sweet, dopey roommate, and Grantaire was profoundly uninterested in either of them. They went to ABC meetings, and hung out at the Musain, but they weren't good friends. And then the first of the protests had happened, and Marius had met Cosette, or perhaps it had happened the other way around, and Grantaire had found Éponine like that near his flat, and brought her inside. They might have been proper friends after that, but Grantaire was already failing at being a decent friend to anyone, and it hadn't been long after that that the final blow-out had come.

“So, you're an investigator,” Grantaire says. “How on earth do they manage to pay you?”

“Right now, you're paying me,” Éponine says. “I work on contract. And not just for _EC &C_.” 

“I hope you're not expensive.” Grantaire signals for another round of shots, and realisation hits. “I'm paying for the drinks, right?” He supposes it's fair; he's done it to enough people himself. And it's not like he doesn't have the money.

Éponine dimples at him again. She's a different person when she smiles like that, young and madcap again, full of secret fire and feeling. Which reminds him – 

“Oh jesus, you're working with _Marius_ ,” Grantaire exclaims, and he's two-for-two with the realising-things-right-as-he-says-them today. “Wow, fuck. Is that – how is that even working? How – _how_?”

Éponine doesn't say anything, but the corners of her mouth indent, dimple just faintly shadowed. Her eyelids drop a little, and she looks – she looks just slightly satisfied, Grantaire realises. He's good at reading people when he wants to be, at cataloguing small details of expression, getting them down on paper and canvas. “Holy shit, are you _fucking him_?”

“That's not an appropriate question in a professional relationship," Éponine says, and Grantaire waves a hand at the bar around him, because come _on_ , he may be contracting her services, but this is hardly a professional context. Éponine accepts the correction with a little rueful twist of her mouth, and amends her statement. "I'm not drunk enough to have this conversation with you."

Grantaire pushes another shot along the bar to her, invitingly, and Éponine looks at it for a few moments, clearly weighing her options. 

Telling Grantaire wins. All Grantaire has to do is keep his mouth shut and wait, and the balance tips; she takes the shot and slams it back. 

"Are you drunk enough to talk now?"

"Getting there," she sighs. “What do you want to know? I don't even know - it's not really a thing. It just – happened. Keeps happening. It's a terrible idea." Éponine rubs her forehead with the heel of her hand. "He's still _married_. Technically, they're separated, but he's not over her.”

He doubts that Éponine has talked to anyone else about it, the way it comes spilling out of her; working late together, locking eyes over the scattered files and boxes of Chinese takeout and years of history. Kissing in storage closets, hooking up in hotels and her own apartment and the couch in Courfeyrac's office. Talking about it makes her look tired and unhappy, not gleeful, like Grantaire had been hoping. It's possible that he, like Courfeyrac, wanted filthy details. He passes Éponine his own untouched shot and the shaker, since her need is greater, and she actually bothers with the salt this time, licking it from the inside of her wrist. She looks up and catches him watching.

“I know what you're thinking,” she accuses. “It's not like that."

"Mmhm."

"I should be happy, but I’m not. I'm not the same person I was back then. I think that's the problem. Having him – even just this much of him – I want _something_ , but not this. I don't even know if it's something I want from _Marius_ anymore, and it's driving me crazy. What on earth do I want, if not him? What does it take? The image of him I had in my head for so long – he's not that image, but even if I had him now just the way he was then, I don't think I'd be happy.”

It's a rush of words and pauses and complete logical gaps, but Grantaire does get what she's saying, sort of. If he'd met Enjolras again, and Enjolras had been less than he remembered, or if Grantaire had grown so much that Enjolras no longer measured up to the picture Grantaire had carried of him – No. It's not the same. If Enjolras had still wanted him, however less perfectly perfect Grantaire might have found him, Grantaire would still have taken him for everything he could get, even if he hated himself for doing it and hated Enjolras for being less than his ideal. Grantaire has no illusions about himself when it comes to Enjolras. Éponine, on the other hand, is smart enough to actually use good advice, once given. 

“You've grown up, that's all. It's a good thing. Stop screwing him.” 

“He's _Marius_ ,” Éponine says, like that's rebuttal enough, like Grantaire's completely dense to suggest moving the fuck on. “He was the kindest person I'd ever met, at that point in my life, the first _good_ thing – and he's still good. He's still beautiful. His eyelashes – and his eyes are just – blue,” she says. “Like the sky in the morning, before the sun's risen over the cityline.”

“And you adore his every freckle, I know. You're drunk and I'm cutting you off,” Grantaire says decisively, and waves his credit card at the bartender. He can stand for a lot, but eulogies to Marius Pontmercy's eyelashes are too much. Éponine's own eyes don't remind him of black velvet anymore, he decides; they're closer to shale, containing layers upon layers of compressed history. It's possible that Grantaire's drunk, too. “So, quickly: what happened with him and Cosette?”

“I don't know,” Éponine says, and oh, well, it was worth a shot. “He doesn't know. She just changed her mind one day, he says.”

“It _is_ Marius,” Grantaire points out. “He's not exactly emotionally intelligent. Think of all the warning signs he could have missed!”

Éponine hits him just under the ribs. It's not a debilitating hit, but it's not a weak flail, either. Grantaire would be willing to bet that she knows how to fight, and fight well. Maybe he doesn't need to talk to Enjolras about her.

“It's not funny. He's just - he's lost. I shouldn't be talking about this. I don't talk like this. It's not fair. I told you, I do my job, and I don't share other people's secrets.”

“You've hardly told me _anything_ ,” Grantaire complains. “I'm thirteen years behind on all the gossip. Who's married, who's having babies, who's doing what? Come on, Éponine.”

Éponine stands up, a little unsteadily, and settles her bag on her shoulder. “Fuck that, Grantaire. I'm too drunk for - I have to keep _some_ secrets. Let's get you home.”

“I'll get it out of Courfeyrac later,” Grantaire threatens. He even means it. He's spent most of the past decade trying to make the cut with the former ABC a clean one, after a limping year or two of minimal contact, when trying to keep up with a few of them without having to see Enjolras became impossible. The band-aid's been ripped off now, with a vengeance.


	4. Chapter 4

All Grantaire is really getting out of Courfeyrac these days is free therapy. Another day and another polite, bloodless meeting with Enjolras finds him lying on the couch in Courfeyrac’s office, one arm flung over his eyes and another bottle of Courfeyrac's whiskey drooping from his other hand. Enjolras had barely risen to any of his bait, and had looked well-pressed and orderly and utterly remote, going over boring fact after boring fact like some sort of automaton. 

“I don’t think I can take it,” Grantaire tells Courfeyrac’s ceiling. Which is boring and white and absolutely bland, without a single crack to give it character, without a single hint that it is _aware_ of Grantaire. It’s offensively smooth. There’s no foothold, nothing to take hold of, no flaw.

“Enjolras is probably telling Combeferre the same thing right now,” Courfeyrac tells him without sympathy and without looking over at him, his fingers never pausing in their methodical typing. “He goes in there and complains about dealing with you, just like you’re doing to me. They have a 'discussion' just about every day lately.”

Grantaire removes the arm from his eyes and raises his head an inch from the couch. “Really? He doesn’t seem pissed off about having me palmed off on him anymore. He’s all business.”

“Business in the front, party in the back,” Courfeyrac says, and looks up to laugh when Grantaire nearly falls off the couch. Courfeyrac would make a terrible therapist. Grantaire tells him that, and gets more laughter. 

“ _Terrible.”_

“You don’t pay me to listen to your problems,” Courfeyrac points out. “I mean, I’m not saying no, if you want to. I’m not Enjolras, I’m not going to scorn the filthy lucre of the capitalist pig when it’s offered to me. You don’t even know what I’m willing to do for cash.”

“I know, that’s why I’m not paying you for shit,” Grantaire says. He pauses. “He called me a capitalist pig?”

“Not in so many words. Not in any of those words, actually. It’s Enjolras, he’s like that about taking anything but pro bono. Don’t take it personally. He’s actually interested in your case, which doesn’t usually happen when Combeferre manages to get him to take on some of the gruntwork. Look out, you might join the ranks of his worthy causes yet!”

That’s exactly what Grantaire is afraid of. He doesn’t want to become one of Enjolras’s causes. Enjolras has always fiercely and passionately believed in the things he decides to defend and uphold, but he has a gift for idealising them from a distance, reducing them into something both wholesome and helpless. Grantaire is no hapless victim; he’s the author of his own (mis)fortunes, and walked with eyes deliberately blind into the sticky net. He doesn’t want Enjolras to look at him from a distance, through a diminishing lens Grantaire can’t break through.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know it was causing so much trouble between Enjolras and Combeferre.”

“Oh, it’s not you,” Courfeyrac says. He continues to type, his lower lip caught between his teeth, only giving Grantaire a fraction of his attention. “There’s been friction for a while. We have to take on a certain percentage of paying clients if we want to be able to take on pro bono cases and stay afloat, pay our rent, you know, bourgeois stuff like that, but Enjolras doesn’t always – doesn’t _often_ – agree with some of the work we’re being paid to do. It’s trivial and not worth his time, or it’s not in the public interest, or it’s something outright against his ethics – I don’t know how he lasted as long in public defence as he did, even if he did crash and burn out of it. He admits Combeferre’s logic, but in practice–” He shrugs.

“Mama and Papa are fighting, and you’re caught in the middle?”

“There’s no middle,” Courfeyrac says. “We all want the same thing, we just disagree about how to get there. But it works.” He taps his fingertips thoughtfully against the edge of his desk. “What was I going to ask you? Oh, are you free on Friday?”

“I’m free every night,” Grantaire says. “What do you think I’m doing? It’s just me and my horrible little hotel room and fucking awful TV. I’m bored as _shit_. I don’t know if I’m bored enough to go out with you, though. I don't think we have that kind of relationship.” He batts his eyelashes at Courfeyrac. “You're like a brother to me.”

“Funny, funny,” Courfeyrac says. “I told you, you’d have to pay me for that kind of thing. I take Mastercard, Visa, cold hard cash, no cheques… Seriously, though, dinner. You, me, a dozen of our closest friends from college, Combeferre’s flat. Yes?”

“What?”

“ _Dinner_ ,” Courfeyrac repeats, louder, like Grantaire might have suddenly developed hearing trouble. “We try to get together once a month, but-”

The former ABC haven't always all kept in touch, Courfeyrac tells him as Grantaire boggles, but they've tried, especially when they scattered to the four winds after college. It's easier now they've mostly ended up in the same place again – somehow, Courfeyrac's not sure how it's worked itself out so well.

Grantaire hadn't been surprised that Enjolras and Courfeyrac and Combeferre stayed tight, even gone into partnership together: they'd always been thick as thieves, linked in ideals, eyes set on a shared horizon. That Marius and Éponine work with them is unexpected, but not wholly shocking. Enjolras had drawn the ABC all together back then, like planets in orbit around a white-hot centre, burning so furiously cold it had hurt to look at him. Marius had been a few years younger than the other members, a little lost puppy Bossuet had picked up and turned over to Courfeyrac's more competent care, never quite one of them even when he trailed after Courfeyrac to meetings. Éponine had trailed behind _him_ , fixed on Marius like his own pining moon, spinning to a different centre than the rest. Neither Marius nor Éponine have ever quite lost their air of lost stray, even if in Éponine now it's transmuted into independence. Therefore, Grantaire is not completely surprised that they gravitated back to Enjolras when their other strings were cut. 

He's surprised that everyone else seems to have done the same thing. What does that make him? Some kind of meteorite that streaked through their regular orbit and then blazed the fuck out? And then back in again? He's not actually sure how meteors work. Science has never been Grantaire's thing. Maybe they can keyed to some sort of periodic collision course and set to explode on a regular schedule, like a cosmic bad fucking joke.

“Hell if I know why, but everyone's excited to see you,” Courfeyrac says, and he's still talking somehow. He pauses when Grantaire doesn't respond. “Hey, of course I know why, don't pout. It's going to be a thing. A good thing. You've already admitted you can come, so don't even think about not coming.”

 _It's a trap!_ , Grantaire thinks, too late. Courfeyrac is looking at him expectantly, happy and hopeful. Grantaire can't say no to that.

“Fine,” he says, grudgingly, and gets rewarded with a brilliant, satisfied grin. Definitely a trap, and one he walked right into. 

“Excellent! If you're there, Enjolras might even come for once, and let me tell you, getting him to come is like fucking pulling teeth.”

“Are you fucking kidding,” Grantaire says. “If I'm there, he definitely won't be there.”

“Ye of little faith,” Courfeyrac says, waggling his eyebrows, “I have my ways.” He tosses a pen cap across the room at him. “Get the fuck out, you're an energy suck and I've got actual work to do. I'll text you the address.”

“I hate you,” Grantaire tells him, “I hate your ways,” but he goes.

-

He has another meeting with Enjolras on Friday afternoon, before the foreboding Dinner At Combeferre's. Grantaire's pretty sure that Éponine didn't set him up with a new phone with a very, very private number for anything other than emergencies and possibly plotting, but Courfeyrac has been taking unfair advantage. Grantaire has received no less than six texts by the time he gets to _Enjolras, Combeferre et Courfeyrac_ :

**Courfeyrac**  
 _hey dude, dinner at combeferre's tonight, don't forget!_

**Courfeyrac**  
 _and by forget I mean “forget”. no excuses accepted_

**Courfeyrac**  
 _you're meeting with enjolras this pm right? you can't escape me_

**Courfeyrac**  
 _seriously I know where you live rn_

**Courfeyrac**  
 _head's up, he's PISSED. look out_

**Courfeyrac**  
 _it's not safe to go back in the water_

-

“We're going to _annihilate_ them,” Enjolras vows, and oh yes, as promised, he is pissed. He's stalking around his office like some baited jungle cat, his jacket flung carelessly over his chair and his shirt sleeves pushed up. He even runs his hand angrily through his hair a few times, and one or two of his much-suppressed curls are breaking free.

Honestly, Grantaire's enjoying sitting back and watching the show. On fire with wrath is a fantastically good look on Enjolras.

“They seem to think that if they just keep stalling, I'll shut up and go away!” Enjolras has said it several times already, but it still comes out incredulous. “They're not fucking taking us _seriously_.” He's completed a circuit of the space in front of his desk, and brought up short, turns on his heel to pace in the opposite direction. “They seem to think that they can just jerk me around, like – oh, how sweet, this little lawyer thinks he can threaten to take us to court, but we're a big fucking deal, we can just _ignore_ that, it's not like we have to take it seriously, like – like they think I'll back down, like they don't think that I will actually _fuck them up.”_

Grantaire keeps quiet. He's a little afraid that if he draws attention to himself, Enjolras will remember that he's his _client_ , and also _Grantaire_ , and the gates will close and the starched exterior will slam back down, and Grantaire won't get to see any more of him like this, passionate and alive and literally tearing at his hair. 

Christ, it's hard, though. He wants to applaud, or maybe shove Enjolras back against his desk and fuck him on it, or possibly to fall to his knees, grab Enjolras's hips to keep him in place, and tear at his belt.

“If they think they can just – if they think I'm not serious, they're going to learn,” Enjolras tells the bust of Robespierre, now in pride of place on the bookshelf. “Punitive. We're going to hit them up for costs and file again, and if they seriously think they can ignore an official summons, I'm going to – _fuck_.”

He runs another hand through his hair, and breathes heavily through his nose. Grantaire can actually see a muscle twitching over the sharp angle of his jaw. He admires the effect – marble come to life, like a male Galatea – until Enjolras finally straightens his shoulders and disciplines his mouth into a tight line. 

“I'm sorry,” he says. “That was–”

“Don't _apologise_ ,” Grantaire says, getting to his feet, and it's maybe the sincerest, most heartfelt thing he's ever said in this office. “It's not like I haven't seen you mad before. I _like_ it when you're mad. I hired you to be mad, not to go through the motions.”

“Stop reminding me that you're paying me,” Enjolras says, but it's perfunctory. He's actually looking at Grantaire now, focused on him like a promise. “These people are snakes. I'm going to destroy them.”

“They will rue the day they fucked with you,” Grantaire agrees, nodding helplessly back. “I'd bet on you every time, no matter how many hot as shit lawyers they have on retainer.”

Enjolras actually smiles at that. “Thank you, I think.” In the light, the curve of his cheekbone and the straight line of his nose are perfect.

He hasn't smiled at anything Grantaire's said in thirteen years, and it's absolutely - Grantaire could get drunk on that alone. He _does_ get drunk on it, mouth stretching into an answering grin, tilted crazily, and reaches out a little distance to put his hand Enjolras's arm where he's rolled up his shirt sleeves. It's bare and warm and shocking, and the _second_ Grantaire touches him skin-to-skin he knows he's fucked up.

Enjolras freezes at the touch. The smile disappears. 

He's been distracted this entire meeting, rage fully fixated well outside this room. Now he's completely present, more viscerally _there_ than most people ever manage to be. His eyes skitter from Grantaire's face to his hand and then his mouth, briefly, which is enough of an invitation for Grantaire.

He touched Enjolras without thinking at all, a reflex; if he had been thinking, he wouldn't have done it. He's always been too much of a coward when it comes to his stupid, inappropriate feelings. Enjolras had been the one to start things back in college, and the one to end them. Grantaire should take his hand away, step back. This can only go badly. 

Enjolras is looking at his _mouth_ , his pale eyelids lowered, and Grantaire is touching him, and he didn't mean to, but Enjolras hasn't pulled away.

He moves before he has time to change his mind, forward, and kisses him while his brain quietly and efficiently panics and his hands move up anyway to hold the back of Enjolras's head, thinking, _oh god, please, fuck_ – 

It's like kissing a statue. Hard, unyielding, unresponsive. Galatea is ivory and Pygmalion is insane.

_Fuck, fuck, FUCK._

Grantaire's brain is babbling furious nonsense and his muscles are still locked in terror when Enjolras finally moves. Moves the right way, with him and against him and pressing closer, his mouth opening under his. 

Then his tongue is in Grantaire's mouth. It touches his with a shock like a needle piercing home, and Grantaire makes a helpless, desperate noise and melts into him.

They kiss hard, fast, for a length of time Grantaire can't guess – he's not exactly counting out _one mississippi, two mississippi, Enjolras is licking my teeth, three mississippi_ – but he's breathless when Enjolras finally pulls back, panting. His eyes are wide and blue, still fixed on Grantaire's mouth, and his hair is ruffled at the back where Grantaire's hands have been. 

They're not standing where they started. There's a cascade of papers on the floor that Grantaire doesn't remember knocking over. The edge of the desk is flush against Enjolras's back, and he's leaning back against it, as far as he can get from Grantaire without climbing over it. He's put half a metre of space between them. 

Grantaire stands very still, digging his fingernails into the palms of his hands, ignoring every instinct to run, to get the _hell_ out of here, because he's completely incapable of not screwing this up if he speaks first.

“That didn't – that was a bad idea,” Enjolras says. He says it firmly, like if he says it confidently enough, he can make Grantaire agree that it didn't happen and that if, possibly, it did happen, it's much better mutually forgotten. “I think, uh. That's enough for today. I'll be in contact for future – I'll email you. You should go. Please.”

Grantaire's hands are still tingling with the sense-memory of his hair, the animal-warmth of it close to his scalp, and every nerve ending in his own mouth is blazing. He wants to cover it like a secret, like a _nakedness,_ but if he uncurls his hands he's not totally sure what he'll do with them. Punch Enjolras, possibly. Grab him again and kiss him harder. Pick up the green-glass lamp on his desk and throw it to the floor.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

-

Courfeyrac buttonholes him in the hallway. Grantaire must look wrecked, because Courfeyrac opens his mouth to say something – something about dinner, probably, some lightly-uttered-yet-dire threat – but he closes it when he gets a look at Grantaire's face.

“Are you okay? I'm sorry,” he says, and Grantaire actually wonders for a second if he knows what just happened, if he was able to look at him and read _Enjolras kissed me back and threw me out!!!_ scrawled across his features, suddenly visible like a message written in milk held up to a flame. “I knew he was in a terrible mood – those assholes over at Patron-Minette's in-house firm have been playing total hardball. I tried to warn you – I was going to drop in and kind of supervise, but I had clients of my own to deal with. How much of a shit was he?”

“It was fine,” Grantaire says, short, and Courfeyrac makes a face.

“That bad? Look, come back to my office, have a drink, we can talk it out –”

“Wow, you're actually offering?” Grantaire says. “I'm not dying, you can save the single malt.” He wants a drink. He needs a drink _badly_ , but he needs to get out of here more.

Courfeyrac holds up his hands. He looks relieved, like Grantaire refusing alcohol is a sign of stability. “Okay,” he says. “Good, glad to hear it. I'll see you tonight?”

“Sure,” Grantaire tosses back over his shoulder. He doesn't mean it.

-

Éponine finds him an hour or two later at the dive bar she took him to the previous week. In retrospect, it was a poor decision to go somewhere that she had taken him to personally. If he'd been cleverer, he would have gone further and sunk anchor somewhere anonymous and far afield. He tells Éponine this blearily and she looks scornful at the very idea of wasting her time running him down at his known haunts.

“How did you find me, then?” He squints suspiciously at the bartender. Éponine looks meaningfully at his phone, set out on the bar. “You _chipped_ me?”

“If I chipped you, you'd know,” Éponine says, and pinches his upper arm hard enough to make him yelp. “Feel that? You'd feel the syringe, unless I knocked you out first, and after it was done, you'd feel the implant under your skin like buckshot, just here.” She pinches him again on the back of his neck, a nip of her thumb and forefinger, and he spills his drink everywhere.

“Fuck, Éponine,” he says, slapping uselessly at her hand; it's already gone. “What did I do to deserve that?”

“You tell me,” she says. “Everyone's at Combeferre's, you were meant to be there twenty minutes ago. Bossuet made you a cake, you know. And considering – I was concerned, until I pulled up MobileMe.”

“You were worried about me? That's cute. I'm very touched.” 

“You don't actually know anything about Patron-Minette, do you,” Éponine says, and it's accusing and tired and concerned at the same time, and Grantaire just wants her to go away and leave him in peace with his credit card and the alcoholic contents of this shitty hole-in-the-wall. 

“If I don't know anything, it's because you haven't told me,” he says. She flinches. “I know enough, Éponine. I may not know all the mechanisms or whatever, the more slimy business end, the shell game, whatever, but the filthy, shitty underbelly? I have an idea. Go _away_ , Éponine.”

“That's not good enough. Bossuet made you a _cake_. If you come with me now, you can pretend that you were just running late, or you got lost, or you stopped to smell the flowers, I don't care. Can you puke?”

“Can I puke,” Grantaire says, rolling the question around in his mouth like a philosophical quandary. “ _Can_ I puke? One oesophagus, check; one gorge, rising; one stomach, roiling. Signs point to yes, theoretically speaking, but if you're asking in a practical sense, the answer right now would be no. I'd have to drink a lot more than this to get puking drunk. It's all about stamina, you know. Like training for a marathon.” He pats the side of his stomach he's guessing houses his liver. “Not even close to the puking finish line yet.”

“I'd forgotten your speeches,” Éponine says. She doesn't sound like they're a fond memory. “There's a coffee shop a block down.”

Grantaire's not actually sure how he ends up in that coffee shop instead of staying comfortably on his barstool, but he has the vague feeling that Éponine went for the back of his neck again, like a mother cat picking up an errant kitten. He really, really hopes that she doesn't own a taser. The streets wouldn't be safe.

Espresso can apparently come in tiny cardboard cups, the size and shape of shot glasses. Éponine doesn't seem to appreciate the irony of this when Grantaire shares it with her. He knocks back two, wincing at the bitterness, and winces again when Éponine orders an extra-large drip coffee and shoves it into his hands.

“Are you _trying_ to make me throw up?” he asks plaintively. “I told you, it won't work. This is just an exercise in sadism.”

“I could punch you in the stomach, if you think that would loosen your gag reflex,” she offers, and Grantaire shuts up. Éponine buys a bottle of water, too, and makes him juggle the coffee in order to take it. “We have to walk twelve blocks,” she says. “See how much you can drink by the time we get there.”

“Seriously, going to throw up,” Grantaire grumbles, but he's definitely thinking more clearly in the cold winter evening. He's a little further along the road to sober by the time they get to Combeferre's building, and Éponine tosses the coffee cup for him and silently pulls some gum out of her purse. “Thank you,” he says, and it's not just for the gum.

“You did it for me once,” she says, which is not exactly how Grantaire remembers it, and then presses the buzzer.


	5. Chapter 5

They don’t talk on the way up the stairs, and when they reach the door of Combeferre’s apartment Éponine looks at Grantaire like she wants to straighten his collar, but already knows there’s no point. She squeezes his arm instead. Grantaire is passionately grateful that she's the one standing beside him, possibly the only person who might truly understand why meeting up with the ABC again isn’t all sunshine and delight for him.

Combeferre opens the door to them before Grantaire has really had time to paste on his best/worst wobbling smile. “Grantaire, hello,” he says, faultlessly polite and welcoming, and doesn’t mention the time. “Can I take your coat?”

“Sure,” Grantaire says, shrugging awkwardly out of it. That should get rid of most of the _eau de bar,_ at least. He can hear noise from deeper in the apartment, voices and laughter not quite resolving into intelligible words.

Combeferre takes Éponine’s coat without needing to ask, helping her tuck her hair out of the way and juggle her purse with all the form of an Edwardian valet. He’s careful about it, like she’s some sort of delicate glass figurine, and not someone who was just cheerfully offering to punch Grantaire and could probably back her threats up. He murmurs something Grantaire doesn't catch, and Éponine nods fractionally in return. 

“Come in, please,” Combeferre says when he's extricated her from her sleeves, and the door closes behind them. 

Grantaire can’t duck out now without making an actual scene. He wishes Éponine had left him alone to drink. 

Someone gives him a little push between his shoulder blades, and he twists to glare at Éponine, but she's already ahead of him, and it's Combeferre's hand on his back. “Through here, into the living room–”

Following him deeper into the apartment, Grantaire is immediately aware of several things: the sudden increase in warmth, the sudden increase in volume, and then the _people_. There’s just too many, all looking at him. He essays a smile, sickly, in their general direction, and okay, now he’s ready to bring up his bellyful of curdled coffee and Bombay Sapphire, twenty minutes too late for it to do him any good. 

“'Lo,” he says, after one wild-eyed look around the living area, and drops his gaze to his feet. 

“Grantaire!” someone says, and there’s a lot of noise, more noise, too much noise, and when he looks up he’s looking squarely at someone’s chest. Seconds later, he’s crushed against it.

“It’s good to see you again,” the giant enfolding him rumbles, vibrating directly against the side of his head, and Grantaire chokes and pats his back in weak reciprocity before Courfeyrac – clearly Courfeyrac, loud and clear and confident enough to cut through any amount of ambient noise – calls out “Let him go, Bahorel, he needs to breathe!”

Bahorel releases him with another squashing hug, and Grantaire is free again, and slightly less whelmed. Courfeyrac nods at him encouragingly, and after a moment Grantaire can look away from his safely familiar countenances and skim the other faces. Enjolras isn’t here. He can do this.

Bahorel, seen from a more remote distance than crushed against his chest, is huge and beaming and now has an earring, a spiked spiral that looks like it passes through the cartilage. If Grantaire was still painting, he'd like to have Bahorel sit for him, pose him as a modern Atlas or Hercules holding up the earth on his broad shoulders. 

He looks around the room, properly. It's a sausagefest. He might have guessed that; apart from Éponine, there's only one other woman, beautiful and poised and with her dark hair held up with ornately carved wooden combs. After a second, Grantaire places her as Musichetta, grown up, and the man at her side wearing thick-framed plastic glasses and a dark pea coat that Combeferre obviously hadn't been able to part him from is Joly. Still mortally afraid of pneumonia, Grantaire supposes. 

The man beside _him_ is patently Bossuet; bald as an egg, without a single strand of hair to show for himself. Strangely, the clean-shaven look is a definite improvement on the look Grantaire remembers; Bossuet had been unable to accept the cosmic unfairness of thinning hair at twenty-two, and he'd spent hours every morning carefully combed his remaining strands over the growing spot, lacquering them in place with carbon-dioxide-destroying amounts of product. 

Marius, Éponine, Courfeyrac, Combeferre – Grantaire knows them all, at least. Enjolras isn't the only face missing. Jehan isn't there, or Feuilly - and of course, neither is Cosette. Grantaire's not going to ask. 

“I hear you have money now, but you still dress like a hobo,” Bossuet says cheerfully, and okay, that's an icebreaker. “What's up with that? I would’ve refused to be seen with you in that _cardigan_ back in college, man, and you at least had the excuse of being a poor art student back then.”

Grantaire cracks up; he can’t help it. The instantly dismayed looks Joly and Musichetta share and Courfeyrac’s application of palm to face are _hilarious_. “Wow, that’s a welcome,” he says, when he’s laughed it out. “Thirteen years, L’Aigle, and that’s how you greet me?”

“Well, it was that or complaining that you still have all your curls,” Bossuet says. “It’s not fair. I accept that it’s simply how the world works – against me – but it’s still not fair.”

“Stop browbeating our little lost lamb,” Courfeyrac says, clearly having appointed himself master of ceremonies, running a ruthless hand through Grantaire's curls and tugging. “See? Fleece still intact.”

“Hey,” Grantaire squawks, protesting the appellation of 'lamb' as much as the hair pulling. “Black sheep, at least, thanks.”

“The important part is that you're back in the fold and away from the wolves with their big, scary teeth,” Courfeyrac tells him cheerfully, and Grantaire gets hit with a sense-memory: Montparnasse leaving red marks like ladders up the inside of his thighs, half-crescent bite marks and broken capillaries of bruises. He shakes his head again, disguises it as an attempt to get his hair back in order; _breathes._

“Let him sit down,” Combeferre says. “You're crowding him. Let's all sit down, and have something to eat like civilised people, and you can tell Grantaire you've missed him without cracking his ribs, Bahorel, or quite literally pulling his pigtails, _Courfeyrac_.”

“As if I get a chance to miss him, he's taking up square footage in my office every day!” Courfeyrac shouts, but there's a general movement back to the long dining table which Grantaire is pretty sure Enjolras would disapprove of, if he were here: a rectangle implies a head, and a foot, positions of inferiority and superiority. With retrospect, he can see Enjolras's hand at work in the strange oval conference table, when simple physics and an appreciation of how space works would make for a much more practical solution for the tiny room than strict adherence to equality, King Arthur's Round Table or not.

God, he needs to stop thinking about Enjolras, about – he's _here_ , with people he hasn't seen in over a decade, and he can't keep his head together long enough to appreciate that. If the sudden intrusive thoughts were helpful distractions from the magnitude of it all, that would be one thing, but they're not; they wind him tighter and tighter, and he's terrified of the coming moment when they'll stop, and he'll start spinning wildly in the opposite direction.

Table aside, Combeferre's living room is very bare; almost monk-like. There are bookshelves, and a long couch, a few scattered armchairs, but Grantaire's seen his office, and it's much more homelike than his apartment. Combeferre's office is over-stuffed and book-filled and lived in, dark and cosy and weirdly cave-like. His living room echoes, even full of people - people who are tactfully chatting and giving Grantaire a moment to catch his breath, and god, he can't screw this up, he still _loves_ them, he's _missed_ them.

Éponine is sitting next to Marius, which is interesting. They're studiously not looking at each other, or touching; Éponine is talking to Bahorel, and Marius is saying something to Joly, but Marius is pink under his freckles in a way that owes nothing to the space heater, and just looking at him makes Grantaire wince with sympathetic discomfort. That is different from the old days, when Marius had never seemed to be aware that Éponine existed as a physical being, as a woman, as different from another Feuilly or Bossuet.

“So, any kids yet?” Grantaire asks Musichetta, sitting down. Conversational ice is just something that needs to be broken thoroughly, tact or not.

“Wow,” she says, the same way he said it to Bossuet, but laughs. “I do, yes. If I start talking about them I'm going to get very boring and forget to ask you about yourself, though, so I don't know if that's a path you want to take.”

“Are you kidding, that's _perfect_ ,” Grantaire says. “Do you have pictures? Get them out, I need to see.” He's tossing up on whether it's appropriate to ask about paternity – there's tactless, and then there's 'So, who's the daddy?' – because it's not like he can just assume that Musichetta and Joly are together these days just because they were dating in college, and there was always the Bossuet Question which no one had been brave enough to ask out loud – 

Joly solves his quandary by looking up from his conversation with Marius, digging in his coat pocket, and handing Musichetta his phone. 

“Here,” she says, unlocking it, and Grantaire's impressed; it's a brave man who lets his significant other have full access to his tech. “Isabel is four, and Gabriel is two.” They're beautiful children, with Musichetta's big dark eyes and dark curls, and he tells her so happily. He's usually bored by pictures of other people's kids, and lies when he compliments them or fails to respond appropriately, which always goes down like a lead balloon with doting parents, but these pictures are interesting in a way pictures of strangers' children never are. 

He scrolls through an album of photos of Isabel: dressed as a pirate, building a sandcastle with Bossuet and her little brother, sitting on Bahorel's shoulders and using his ears to steer; riding a tiny bike with training wheels, Joly's hands steadying on the handlebars. There's another album that starts with pictures of Gabriel as a baby, in Musichetta's arms, or against Joly's shoulder, or fast asleep on Combeferre's chest while Combeferre looks down at him with the softest look on his face while Courfeyrac laughs in the background, caught open-mouthed and delighted. 

The more recent pictures show him as a raucous toddler, with birthday cake around his mouth and in his hair and oozing out between two tight little fists, beaming with triumph. The birthday must have been recent, because there are dozens of photos from it, and the ABC feature in most of them. Even Enjolras is there, wearing _jeans_ and a _t-shirt_ , and smiling. He holds Gabriel like he's not afraid of babies, or of getting cake on his shirt, things that weren't true back when Grantaire knew him. 

“The names were a compromise,” Bossuet adds from Grantaire's other side, hooking his chin over his shoulder, and okay, maybe the Bossuet Question is still one that needs to be answered. “We wanted names that were Spanish _and_ French, but man, Joly's mama still makes a point of writing _Isabelle_ on every birthday card, because spelling it different means the terrorists win or something. I keep saying that the next kid should be full-out called María Inmaculada Concepción, boy or girl, I think it could work, but – ”

“I keep saying there'll be no third kid,” Musichetta says.

Combeferre is pouring out red wine into a collection of onion-shaped glasses, big-bellied on their fragile stems. Grantaire's trying to pay attention to the gentle bickering between Bossuet and Musichetta, with occasional casual input from Joly, wondering if he can just flat-out ask who's the daddy, but he still catches the interplay between Combeferre and Éponine: a tiny questioning nod in Grantaire's own direction, answered with an equally tiny shake, and one wine glass ends up empty. It's all done with such slight-of-hand that Grantaire doubts that anyone else notices that he's the only one without a glass once the pouring's done.

Courfeyrac stops poking Bahorel with his fork and checks his watch. “Are we going to wait, or should we start on the food?” 

If he's waiting for Enjolras, Grantaire's pretty sure they'll be waiting forever. Combeferre shakes his head again, and for someone Grantaire is beginning to suspect of being some type of _éminence grise,_ he seems quietly confident. “No, we'll give them a few more minutes.”

“So, Grantaire, how have you been doing?” Joly asks seriously, and oh fuck, that's not what Grantaire wants to talk about. He's been carefully avoiding Joly's eye since he arrived – he can still barely meet Combeferre's gaze head-on – but he's not sure how to get out of this. He's already played the kid card. One of his very last memories of Joly is his white face leaning over him, looking intensely concerned, worry making him steadier and more competent than his usual hypochondriac flailing. Grantaire remembers thinking groggily that okay, maybe he would make a good doctor one day, and not just go messily to pieces when confronted with his first car crash victim or flesh-eating bacterium.

Éponine breaks off her muttered conversation with Marius and says, wilfully misunderstanding, “He's doing just fine, believe me. I've seen his bank statements – he doesn't have to dress like a hobo, he's just being a hipster.”

Grantaire loves her. “Hey, wench, I was dressing like this before hipsters were a thing. You knew me when, you can all actually confirm that.”

“It's true,” Marius says, and starts telling a story about the time he needed to borrow a decent shirt and Courfeyrac was going through his loud, printed t-shirt phase, and the moment passes. Grantaire can still feel Joly watching him, taking his emotional temperature with his eyes.

The buzzer sounds. Saved by the bell. It's an interesting re-staging of how Grantaire imagines it must have gone down when he and Éponine arrived; sudden attention directed to the front hall, Combeferre quietly excusing himself from the table and going to the door. Conversation mutes, and then resumes.

“Sorry I'm so late,” someone says breathlessly, and Grantaire's hackles go down again; it's not Enjolras. He's disappointed. He's relieved.

It's a handsome man with chestnut hair just barely brushing his collar, and it takes Grantaire a moment to realise that this stranger is _Jehan_. The Jehan he remembers was at most twenty-two, and slender-shouldered and lithe as a reed, with a tumble of curls that somehow managed to look neither affected or stringy and unkempt, as most men with long hair ended up. This is a grown man of thirty-five, with a clear, strong jaw and the faintest hint of stubble. “One of my grad students ran into a hitch and I had to talk her down – not an easy task, she has to rewrite her last chapter, and you know how grad students g– _Grantaire_!”

He also smells delicious, Grantaire discovers, when he's swept into another hug and kissed lightly on each cheek. A cool clean scent, like fresh linen. He blinks dazedly when he's released, and Jehan squeezes his shoulders like he can't take his hands off him just yet, or he might disappear. 

“It's wonderful to see you – it's been such a very long time! We've missed you, you have no idea–”

“You, too,” Grantaire says, and is embraced again; he rolls a helpless eye at Éponine, whose dimple is flashing and who utterly refuses to help him this time. 

“Now Jehan is here, we can eat,” Combeferre says, and Grantaire supposes that means that Feuilly is not expected, and that for all Courfeyrac's boasting about his _ways_ , Enjolras is also being chalked up as a loss. He feels vaguely guilty about that; if he hadn't kissed him, maybe Enjolras would be here, in this tight little knot of his favourite people, instead of mewed up alone in his office or his apartment. Courfeyrac has given him the impression that Enjolras's social life is disturbingly lacking. 

Then again, Grantaire didn't make Enjolras kiss him back.

“I made a cake!” Bossuet announces proudly, and Jehan kisses him on the top of his head as he passes, while Musichetta and Joly mime frantically. _Pretend you like it_ , Joly mouths, and _it's not good,_ Musichetta's fretted brow and pulled-down mouth hint.

“Food, then cake,” Combeferre says sternly. Éponine gets up silently from the table and follows him into the kitchen, and Musichetta turns to Jehan and says, “Which student?”

“Giselle,” Jehan says, and rolls his eyes. “I do feel for her, but she's wildly off-tangent, and getting further away -”

“Oh, _Giselle_.” Musichetta shakes her head like this is absolutely intelligible to her, and says, “How far did she get? I had one that dropped communication for three weeks, and when he came back he had another twenty thousand words which were very good, and perhaps he could turn them into an article, but they didn't work with his thesis at all, and I swear, when I told him they had to go he actually cried–”

“I hate it when they cry,” Jehan agrees, looking stricken.

“I have no pity, if they just kept me in the loop the problem could be avoided–”

“Hey, stop talking shop,” Bossuet says. “Grantaire's going to think that you got all old and boring.”

“We did all get old and boring,” Bahorel says, absolutely solemn. It's not a statement that works with his earring or the twisting patterns snaking up his wrist and disappearing under his t-shirt sleeve, and he can't keep his face straight long. 

“Do you _work_ together?” Grantaire asks; he has to. 

Jehan and Musichetta exchange glances. “We work _adjacently_ ,” Jehan says. “Same university, different departments. Well, actually, if funding doesn't pick up her department might get folded into mine, but we're not sharing a building yet. Musichetta's in Comparative Literature, but I teach poetry.”

“You realise that this is all kind of incestuous, right,” Grantaire says, gesturing from Jehan to Musichetta, and then Marius to Courfeyrac, to Combeferre and Éponine laying out plates of food. “ _Incestuous_.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” Bossuet says delightedly, and Grantaire's about to protest that, uh, he does, employment aside; he's fully clued into the whole nebulous Musichetta-Joly-Bossuet thing, and he knows about Éponine and Marius, and he really doubts that half the people at this table do, given how painfully discreet Marius and Éponine are being about it – 

“Seriously, you don't even know,” Courfeyrac says, and cackles. “In grad school, after the protests, after we settled everything and they finally let us finish college – did we tell you this story – Enjolras had this great idea for a co-op, living in a little self-sufficient society–“

“It was great, and then it was terrible,” Joly says, and Marius makes a face, like it brings back memories too awful to be faced. “We all had apartments in this kind of derelict building–" 

“Which worked out well until Enjolras accused our landlord of being a slumlord and then took him to court over the plumbing,” Courfeyrac breaks in, and Combeferre looks amused but demurs:

“He was right–”

“But was it _tactful_?”

“It didn't end well,” Bahorel says, laconic, and even Grantaire can tell that that's a massive understatement. Éponine looks like it's a story she's heard before but didn't live through, a distant smile on her face, and Grantaire resolves to pin her down and get a good timeline of times past out of her at some point. The food disappears as the ABC try to top each other with their co-op tales, and honestly, it's starting to sound to Grantaire like Enjolras tried to start his own little commune with himself as cult-leader. This kind of continued contact and co-dependency just isn't normal for college friends; graduation should mean dispersion, everyone vanishing in a thousand directions like dandelion seeds. He shares this with the table, and there's more laughter and significant glances.

“Well, I used to work for _Enjolras, Combeferre et Courfeyrac_ when they started up, three years ago,” Bossuet says. “I never finished law school, but I had some skills, so they took me on as a legal secretary.” He grins at Courfeyrac. “Then they fired me, of course.”

Combeferre says “That is _not_ what happened,” while Courfeyrac yelps in outrage. “You decided that you wanted to pursue another path –”

“It was better for everyone,” Bossuet allows. “Mutual decision! They call me in sometimes to pick up the slack when they're at full capacity and have extra, or they've driven one of my replacements to drink, or to bridge-jumping –”

Joly looks at Grantaire sharply. Grantaire ignores him. “What do you do now, then? Please don't tell me you're working with any of these people – this is just, this isn't _normal._ ”

“Right now? I'm tending bar at night, and writing my great novel during the day,” Bossuet says, “which is partly a lie, mostly during the day I'm watching the kids, but I don't want to put 'child-care provider' on my C.V., it's chequered enough already.” He starts ticking off professions on his fingertips. “Bartender, secretary, pastry chef – that didn't really work out – secretary again, retail, legal secretary, more retail, manager at a sporting goods store that went under three weeks after promoting me, bartending again –”

“Stop, we could be here _all day_ ,” Jehan begs, and Courfeyrac points an accusing finger at him.

“Jehan does poetry readings at Bossuet's bar sometimes!”

Jehan doesn't look at all worried about being exposed as part of this sinister web of affiliation. “And Bahorel works for the firm, sometimes, when they need back-up. I think it's nice.”

“See, _incestuous_ ,” Grantaire says. “Have any of you ever gotten away? Is this a _cult_?”

“Of course we have,” Marius says, sounding affronted. “I did four years working in New York, before I came back here–”

“Éponine moved to the west coast after college,” Musichetta adds helpfully, “and I went to grad school in Brazil, and then Barcelona–”

“Feuilly's in Japan until the end of next year–”

“And Cosette's on botanical survey in Sarawak,” Bossuet adds cheerfully, then winces. There's a sudden silence.

Marius's face makes Grantaire think of some war movie when a character's just taken a bullet somewhere vital, and it registers on their face in slow, lingering detail before the camera pans down to show the gory wound. Everyone is trying very hard and very politely not to look at Marius, except for Éponine, who looks like she wants – _needs_ – to comfort him, and is all but sitting on her hands to stop herself. God, this is unhealthy as fuck, and Grantaire should know.

“Sarawak,” he says, “that sounds awesome, I mean – where is that, even?” 

“Malaysia,” Marius says dully. “She was given a grant to go on observation there for six months, and – she took it.”

“Good for her,” Grantaire says, deliberately obtuse. Courfeyrac is making a sort of throat-cutting gesture at him across the table, but Grantaire ignores him. “So she's a botanist?”

“Biologist, specialising in botany,” Marius says, like explaining Cosette's career trajectory is a long-standing speech he can perform by rote. Courfeyrac switches from pretended throat-cutting to hanging, with very realistic protruding tongue and swivelling eyes. “She's done survey work before, but not so far–”

“I'm going to get the cake,” Combeferre says. “Éponine ?”

“Grantaire,” Jehan says, leaning across the table, “tell me about your work!”

Grantaire groans and puts his head on his arms, smack in the middle of the table. He doesn't suspect Jehan of malicious intent in asking that particular question – Courfeyrac, yes; Jehan, no – but it's obviously karmic retribution for trying to get details out of Marius. 

He's still face-down on the table pretending to be dead while Jehan makes sympathetic noises and Courfeyrac laughs heartlessly and Musichetta strokes his hair, when they all suddenly stop.

“Enjolras!” Marius says, sounding relieved and happy, “you made it!” 

Marius is a terrible person and if Grantaire was married to him, he'd move to Sarawak, too. He refuses to look up. He may as well keep on pretending to be dead; what boots it to be living? Combeferre's fucking buzzer should have gone off and warned him. He needed more warning. Of course glorious Enjolras has Combeferre's building code, he probably has his own swipe-card – 

“Is Grantaire well?” Enjolras asks, sounding almost concerned.

“Grantaire's being weird,” Bahorel says, shrug clear in his voice. “We're having cake.”

“I showed up at the right time, then.”

“You're late,” Courfeyrac accuses. “How many times did I text you? At least fifty. I shouldn't have to drag you to these things by your hair anymore, it hurts our feelings.”

“Fifty, really, I stopped counting at one hundred,” Enjolras says, dry as white wine, and Grantaire wants to look up, just to see the expression he's making. “I wasn't doing it to wound you, Courfeyrac, I had some business to take care of first.”

“Who did you kill?” Joly, sounding unhealthily excited for a doctor.

“No one yet,” Enjolras says, and Grantaire raises his head a fraction and looks up through his hanging curls. Enjolras is looking at him, and he looks tired and exasperated, but less formal and more relaxed than he's been in Grantaire's presence since –

“Hi,” Grantaire says, caught, and pushes his hair out of the way. When it's gone, he decides to sit up, and leans back in his chair like the whole lying-on-the-table thing was fully intentional and not at all an evasive manoeuvre. It could be worse. He could have been lying _under_ it, and wow, that would really have been like old times. 

“Hi,” Enjolras says, and it must be Grantaire's imagination, or possibly Combeferre's truly efficient space heater, but he looks faintly flushed.

“Cake,” Éponine says, coming back in armed with a large knife and a stack of plates, with Combeferre in her wake. “Hello, Enjolras.”

“We're going to be short a seat,” Musichetta says, and smiles across the table at Joly. _Wait, wait!_ Grantaire shrieks mentally, but she's already gone, Joly is already pushing his chair back and making room for her on his lap, and Éponine is passing out the plates and puts one in Musichetta's empty place. 

Enjolras sits down, and Grantaire does not, does _not_ look at him. Fucking Marius, is awkwardness contagious? Grantaire is thirty-five, not eighteen and hearing someone declaim like a militant angel in the quad, not twenty and taking up a seat in the student union just to look at him; not twenty-two and being given the metaphorical key to the castle and fumbling it in the lock, losing it forever. He is a grown man, with a shitty past and a million terrible decisions behind him; he has no illusions left to lose, and there is no excuse for him to still thrill like that eighteen year old when Enjolras's elbow brushes against his.

Everyone is doing that thing where they're pretending not to look in their direction, and their collective gaze becomes all the more pointed for its absence. Grantaire has been back in the bosom of _l'ABC et affiliées_ barely over an hour and he can tell that these people have no privacy among themselves, and their deliberate attempts to give each other some are just not working. If he was planning on staying, he'd do something about that. Blow up all the ineffective barricades, and teach them how to build real walls, with barbed wire and revolving spikes: all intruders will be prosecuted. He's good at that. 

Combeferre sets the cake carefully on the table, and Grantaire can see why Bossuet lost his job as a pastry chef. It's extremely tall, with at least three layers – one of which is starting to slowly escape, and gives the whole thing the effect of the leaning tower of Pisa. It's plastered with thick, glossy ganache, and someone has scrawled _Welcome home Grantaire_ on the top in thin, wobbling lines of pink, and piped swirly things that look like incipient tornadoes around the edges. 

“Isabel helped me with the rosebuds,” Bossuet says, proud.

“They're lovely,” Jehan says gravely, and takes a picture with his phone. 

“Grantaire's always struck me as a rosebud kind of guy,” Courfeyrac says, and gets quelling looks from Jehan, Combeferre, Éponine, Bahorel, Joly, Musichetta, _and_ Enjolras. The Joly-Musichetta(-Bossuet?) offspring are clearly a sacred cow upon which mockery dare not touch. He kind of wishes he was planning to stay long enough to meet them.


	6. Chapter 6

Things happen very, very fast after that.

The dinner itself ends uneventfully: the cake isn't great, but the ganache is delicious, and Grantaire only crunches on eggshell once or twice. It winds down without any further disasters or alarums, and despite his over-consciousness of Enjolras's shoulder brushing his, Grantaire almost falls half-asleep in the warm room, listening to the former – and, apparently, immortal – ABC talk about the impact of classism on access to full constitutional rights, Enjolras fierce and Joly nodding and Bahorel savage. (“Your _mom_ is so classless she could be a Marxist utopia!” Bossuet carols, mid-discussion).

Grantaire could be back in the old student union building before the protests sealed it off, if he just closed his eyes enough to let the scene blur into soft, impressionist focus, half-golden in the low light. It's how he likes to remember that time, and it’s a really shitty irony that it was only after it was long gone Grantaire realised that those years had been the brightest point in his life. It's an even shittier fact that nothing's come close in thirteen years since: no friendships have lasted, no lovers have stuck around, no highs have come without shuddering, bitter comedowns.

The weekend, too, is quiet, and Grantaire's dumb enough to take that as a good omen. When his phone vibrates late on Sunday, he grabs for it immediately. He’s expecting it to be Courfeyrac, of course.

**Éponine**  
 _You should probably check out tomorrow and move somewhere new_

**Grantaire**  
 _do you think im made of money?_

**Éponine**  
 _I keep telling you I’ve seen your bank accounts_

**Grantaire**  
 _then i change my plea to i cant be bothered and i think youre paranoid._

**Éponine**  
I’m a PROFESSIONAL paranoid 

The text he’s actually waiting for comes somewhat later, when Grantaire’s fallen mostly asleep under the influence of a truly disgusting gyro from a nearby Greek diner, and an equally unappetising movie from the early 1990s which he thinks is a thriller about a guy who’s trying to drive his wife crazy, but he’s been half-asleep for so much of it that he couldn’t swear to anything. He almost doesn’t bother reaching for his phone this time.

**Enjolras**  
 _Come by my office tomorrow morning as early as you can. I think we can force their hand._

**Enjolras**  
 _Please, I mean. If you’re not busy._

**Grantaire**  
 _well now youve said please i cant say no can i._

**Enjolras**  
 _You can, but it’s better if you don’t._

**Grantaire**  
 _you don't have to take your clothes off to have a good time but its better if you do_

**Enjolras**  
 _Stop wasting my time._

-

Monday is when the clock starts ticking.

It's absolutely with the intention of annoying Enjolras and earning further accusations of time-wasting that Grantaire stops off at a patisserie on his way into _EC &C_, picking up lattes and croissants aux amandes. Confusing him is just an additional side benefit.

“That's not – why did you,” Enjolras says blankly, taking the coffee, his fingers curving around the warmth of the cup in an almost absent caress. “Thank you, but–”

“I hear your firm catering's not up to par,” Grantaire says, shrugging, “and if you think I'm going to sit through another boring meeting – this time at _eight thirty in the morning_ , seriously, isn't there some kind of labour law that forbids work before nine? There should be – without coffee and food, you're very, very wrong. Judging us lesser mortals by your own impossible standards again, Apollo.” He shrugs again. “And I wasn't going to show up with food and coffee just for myself and drink it right in front of you, that'd be rude. Getting some for you, well, it's just a means to an end.”

“So it's entirely selfishness on your part?” Enjolras says, one side of his mouth lifting. He accepts the pastry, without any of the commentary on bribery or corporate gifts Grantaire was fully expecting, and takes a sip of the coffee.

“Absolutely,” Grantaire agrees, and throws himself into what's now his accustomed chair in front of Enjolras's desk, crossing his ankles. “Alright, lay it on me. What's so important it couldn't wait until, I don't know, noon?”

It's remarkable how fast Enjolras can change gears, one facade replacing another completely. Grantaire's been treated to a lot of Professional Emotionless Enjolras taking over for Irritated and Superior Enjolras lately, only occasionally letting hints of suppressed vexation surface, with a brief, refreshing detour into Angry Enjolras, and a little, very little, Flustered Enjolras. _This_ Enjolras is a new Enjolras – or, more precisely, an old one. Grantaire finally gets exactly what Courfeyrac meant by Business In The Front, Party In The Back.

It's Revolutionary Leader Enjolras alight with world-burning fervour, slightly manic energy allied with righteous conviction, and fuck, Grantaire would buy him anything he wanted, ever, just for the privilege of letting Enjolras throw it all back in his face spitting with fury.

Enjolras leans over the desk. “We've played by all the rules,” he says, “and Patron-Minette have taken that as an invitation to delay and stall and generally fuck us around. They're trying to exhaust your energy and resources and force you to go away. I was working last night, trying to think about how to push them to meet us in court within a reasonable time, since they're turned down my requests for arbitration, and then–” He takes another sip of coffee, ostensibly to whet his lips, but Grantaire was there when he was first learning all the rhetorical tricks of debate that he would later take to the courtroom. He lets Enjolras have his dramatic pause without scoffing or interrupting, and Enjolras sets down the coffee cup ominously. His empty hand curls into a fist; Grantaire's not sure if he's even aware he's doing it. “I thought, if they're not playing by the rules, why should we?”

“Because if we fuck up, they'll ream us twice as hard and be able to use the system to do it?” Grantaire says slowly, and what the fuck, why is he the voice of reason here?

Enjolras smiles, and it's his dangerous smile, the one that means _I will destroy anything that stands in my way._ Grantaire's seen it before. That time had ended in pepper spray and batons and his friends in custody while Grantaire, stupid faithless Grantaire, had been left too late to join in, to make any difference at all, unable to help once it had all gone smash. It was Marius who had helped then, and if he's honest, Grantaire has never been able to forgive him for that.

“That depends on exactly what we do,” Enjolras says. “I want to force them to come to the table, and in the past fortnight we've established a record of good faith. I can defend this all the way to the judge.” He takes another sip of coffee, a satisfied sip, and then looks directly at Grantaire across the desk. 

He has the most forceful personality Grantaire's ever known when he turns it on, laser-bright and ruthlessly focused. He's a human missile full of potential destruction, gunpowder harmless as sand but waiting for a spark. 

“Grantaire,” Enjolras says, leaning forward, and Grantaire braces himself. “Tell me about your work.”

-

“I would like the record to show that I think this is a _terrible_ idea,” Grantaire announces. No one pays any attention. The suit he's borrowed from Courfeyrac is too tight in the ass and a little slippery around the shoulders, and he's wearing a fucking tie, for christ's sake, a tie, he doesn't even own a tie. He doesn't know how Enjolras is making it look so easy.

Éponine looks upsettingly comfortable in heels and a navy-blue silk shift, and even Bahorel's cleaned up, wearing dress pants and a dark blue shirt under his leather bomber. This is a hit team, stripped down to ruthless essential parts and dressed up for camouflage. Enjolras is tight-strung with readiness; Éponine's purse is much bigger for evening wear than fashion dictates, and god only knows what she has stashed in it; and Grantaire realised, around the time the black SUV pulled up outside _EC &C_ and Enjolras opened the back door and gestured impatiently for him to get in, that the occasional contract work Bahorel does has nothing to do with his abandoned law degree, and everything to do with his muscular poundage.

Grantaire's the squeaky wheel, and he feels like it.

The SUV stops in a scruffy part of downtown, and a similar-looking SUV straddling two parking spaces chooses that moment, serendipitously, to pull forward fully into the first space, leaving the second clear.

“Not even your luck is that good,” Grantaire hisses under his breath, but Éponine smiles from the front seat, and gets out. She takes Bahorel's waiting arm, which leaves Grantaire to partner Enjolras inside, and again, Grantaire feels like he's watching a play where every move has been carefully choreographed and things zoom around onstage on invisible wires. 

He cranes his neck at the second SUV as they pass it, but the windows are tinted. Enjolras is close by his side as they walk up the low steps to the former warehouse-turned-edgy-gallery. When they walk through the huge, heavy doors, Bahorel and Éponine leading the way, he puts his hand on Grantaire's arm. It's a distraction that stops Grantaire panicking over exactly what they're doing: carrying the war into enemy territory. 

This is one of the art galleries operated almost exclusively by Patron-Minette, and the change from grimy street to inside space is night and day: the gallery itself is bright and well-lit, an endless industrial space full of chandeliers hanging from the exposed concrete beams. The people inside are all well-dressed, and there's a fucking four-piece string quartet and wait staff carrying around trays of hors d'oeuvre and glasses of champagne, and in well-lit intervals, Grantaire's art is hanging on the walls.

It's not all his, of course; this is not the only place Patron-Minette are showing his work, and even if he'd churned out half a dozen paintings a week, it would have taken him a year to fill this space. 

Éponine snags a flute of champagne off a passing server and presses it into his hand. “Just stay calm.”

“Ha, ha,” Grantaire manages, taking a completely unclassy gulp. How is he supposed to stay calm? He's not one hundred per cent sure what the plan is, and he has the feeling that something's going to happen soon, something _terrible,_ and Enjolras is pressed against his side like his date, not his lawyer. He has nothing to be calm about. 

Enjolras takes a glass of champagne, too, and when he catches Grantaire's incredulous eye, he raises an eyebrow. “Cover,” he says quietly. “We're just walking around like everyone else, looking at the art. Don't do or say anything else until I signal you. Try to look like you're having a good time.”

“Ha,” Grantaire repeats, and swigs more champagne. He can't see Éponine and Bahorel anymore; they've vanished into the crowd. Enjolras pulls him along, and stops in front of a canvas that's not Grantaire's, a landscape that has very little to do with any of the themes of his own work. Whoever put this collection together is a rank amateur. 

Watching Enjolras squint at it is definitely funny. “Do you need me to explain it to you?”

“There's not much to explain,” Enjolras says, but it's a little uncertain. He takes a small, careful sip of champagne, barely getting his lips wet. “It's a park, and there are children in it.”

“On the surface,” Grantaire agrees, “but if you look more closely, it's a park in the middle of a city – not Central Park, that would take actual draughtsmanship, but some imaginary park somewhere, and see–” He gestures at the little placard mounted beside it. “It's called _last piece of a lost earth,_ so the artist's clearly trying to make a statement about urban creep and the industrial impact on the countryside.”

Enjolras nods, like that, at least, he can understand. “And it's good?”

“Oh, it's terrible,” Grantaire says happily. “Trite theme, heavy-handed title, sloppy painting – it's the kind of thing I'd expect from a first-year art student.” 

The couple standing near them take a step back from it like its badness is contagious, when a moment before they'd been staring at it carefully, the husband nodding incrementally like it was slowly communicating a message to him. Enjolras notices them looking at Grantaire, and puts his hand on the small of Grantaire's back, protective; possessive. _Cover,_ he'd said before. They shuffle on. 

“I thought I said 'pretend you're having a good time',” Enjolras says, removing his hand, and Grantaire grins at him shakily.

“Are you kidding? This is how I have fun at art shows,” he says. “It's how half the people here have fun at them, too. You get the ones who know nothing about modern art who pretend like they get it, and then you get the ones who know nothing about art, but they're not faking knowledge and they're looking for something they like, and then you get the ones who know a _lot_ about art, and enjoy it, and also enjoy making fun of the bad, bad artists.” 

“I see.”

“You, on the other hand, are a whole new category,” Grantaire tells him, a little fondness leaking accidentally into his voice. “You don't get it, and you don't care about getting it, and you'll probably never fall in love with a painting for its own sake, unless you go the Louvre and check out _Liberty Leading the People._ You know how some people are tone-deaf? You're art-blind.”

Enjolras doesn't challenge this pronouncement. Behind them, the string quartet starts playing Haydn's Lark. If Grantaire was staging this show, he'd have the quartet play something modern, something that fit the tone of culture taking place in an industrial space at the same time that it challenged it; he'd get rid of the quartet all together and bring in a proper DJ, some kind of wunderkind, not the limp dick you got at other people's weddings. He'd swap out the champagne – boring – for cocktails, something so old-fashioned it's hip again; sloe gin over apricot brandy.

“I wish _I_ was tone-deaf,” he says, and they move down to the next painting, a messy abstract that isn't doing anything interesting with colour or texture, and then one that's much, much better. Grantaire snags more boring champagne and enjoys himself trying to teach Enjolras the difference – and failing – and when they wander past the fourth painting, he's preparing to rip it happily to shreds.

It turns out to be one of his, of course. He doesn't bring that to Enjolras's attention; there are other viewers in earshot, and he doesn't need to. The placard speaks for him, and Enjolras's gaze moves down over the canvas, a long slow sweep that leaves him frowning. It's not one of Grantaire's favourites, certainly, but watching Enjolras look at it makes him want to cover it up with his coat. 

It's one from last year: a painfully thin naked woman lying on her back in a dirty bed, her breasts flattened out almost to vanishing point. The angle is directly overhead, but her eyes stare somewhere off to the left. Grantaire had been fascinated with bringing out the hidden blues and greens under her skin to exaggerated life, but paired with her empty eyes, he has to admit that the effect is more corpselike than Lucian Freud. 

“Beautiful,” a middle-aged lady with too much perfume on whispers to Grantaire's left, and her companion mutters something about brushwork. He focuses on the fool's gold of their compliments so he doesn't have to watch Enjolras's reaction.

The next painting is one of his, too, part of the same series: the same girl sitting on a bathroom floor, hugging her knees, her head turned awkwardly to press a scream or sob into one thigh. Grantaire had painted that because the emotion in the pose had struck him as something real, not smoothed into grace, and he'd liked the imperfection of her skin against the stark black-and-white of the tiles, the halo of her fraying red hair against the heartlessly cheerful yellow shower curtain. He'd paid her to sit however she wanted and talk to him while he sketched and took photos, and when letting her talk herself out had made her cry, he'd kept drawing and used the effect it made. 

Enjolras doesn't say anything to that painting, either, or the next one, or the one after that, but his nostrils definitely compress at a fourth, an unwashed man slumped on the floor with a needle in his arm and an empty bottle of Jack's at his elbow. It's not a self-portrait except in the way everything Grantaire paints is a little bit of him, something seen through his eyes; Grantaire had drawn him because of his smile, which was unnaturally sweet, like a child given an ice cream. He'd liked the contrast, the innocence and the experience twisted together.

"I don't know anything about art," Enjolras says finally, and it's so very true it doesn't need to be said, except Grantaire can hear the _but_ hanging in the air, "but I can see you're talented. When it's realistic – when it's so realistic, I can tell that it's good. But–" there it is – "I don't understand why you use your talent to paint such ugly things."

Grantaire knew it was coming; he'd seen Enjolras slowly recoiling, drawing back from the graphic canvases. He could smile sweetly and tell Enjolras to fuck himself, or he could work up a speech about the nature of art and the harnessing of its power to create an emotional response, the difference between painting some static pastoral delight, Millet’s _Gleaners_ or Corot’s _Bridge at Narni_ , and the same fine rendering used to show something completely discordant and confronting – but Enjolras is art-blind, and Grantaire makes ugly things for ugly people for dirty money, and he no longer has the energy or the anger to defend it.

He smiles at Enjolras over his champagne, and it's much more bitter than sweet. "I just paint what sells," he says, and sees Enjolras recoil further. "Pay me, and I'll churn out the prettiest propaganda your heart could desire, all uplifting scenes of the Noble Poor working for the Common Good, whatever you want, Apollo, I'll do it for you."

"Grantaire," Enjolras begins, sounding almost concerned, and Grantaire shrugs him off, moving onto the next painting, mercifully not one of his. Enjolras follows him like doggedly down the room, moving from painting to sculpture to painting, but he doesn't try to speak to him again. Eventually Grantaire slows down, and when Enjolras joins him at a particularly dreadful abstract, he mocks it for Enjolras's bewildered amusement like that exchange didn't happen, and a few canvases later the strange playful vibe comes back. This could be a date, if they were different people and this wasn't all bent to an ulterior end.

When they stop in front of a huge print on silkscreen, Grantaire recognises one of the people gathered before it, hands clasped neatly behind his back. 

"This is _not_ an accident," he accuses, and Jehan turns to smile at him, all innocent confusion.

"R, I told you I wanted to see your work" he says, and turns back to the silkscreen. "Feuilly would like this. This patterning – am I allowed to take photos in here, or will I get thrown out?"

"Do not do anything to compromise the success of this mission," Enjolras orders, a little too loud, and steps closer to Grantaire when he draws odd looks, like he might prove a human shield of normality. Grantaire leans against him, trying to broadcast _this is just my weird boyfriend, it's okay!_ to any onlookers, and lets Jehan tell him about Feuilly's latest emails and his research into rice _washi_ and onionskin and pre-industrial rag-paper, nodding along like a puppet. It's hard to concentrate on anything but Enjolras warm against his side, allowing the intimacy. 

He keeps an eye on the crowd while Jehan chats, and they move past a sculpture that actually looks like it belongs in this room, old piping and sheet metal welded roughly together into the form of a woman – at least, Grantaire argues that it's a woman, for all its flat pectorals, why would a semi-skeletal structure have breast tissue? The metal apple is clearly a reference to Eve – and Enjolras argues that it's a man, despite its flat pudenda, and steals Grantaire's skeletal point to point out an obvious reason for its lack of phallus.

"Maybe it's trying to suggest that gender is a construct that ceases to exist on an essential, stripped-down plane," Jehan suggests, and Grantaire is instantly annoyed he didn't pick that argument. From Enjolras's faint grimace, he's thinking the same. He's still looking at Enjolras when Jehan presses his arm and says, "I'm so pleased I got this chance to see some of your work, R."

Jehan is a kind person who is careful not to crush the grass when he walks over the lawn, so Grantaire accepts the compliment with a shrug and a soupçon of allowance for that kindness. "Thanks," he mutters. "It's not pretty stuff, but–"

"It's _beautiful,_ " Jehan contradicts, voice cracking the way it does when he feels anything passionately. "The way you see things, Grantaire, pick out the patterns and the – the moments of grace among the saddest parts of life." He presses Grantaire's arm again. "I must have looked at the painting of the girl with the dead bird for half an hour. The detail, the look on her face, the _feathers_ – If an English professor's salary covered it, I'd buy it and keep it for myself."

Grantaire can feel himself going red, and now Enjolras is looking at him like Jehan has just put something in perspective for him. "If it belonged to me, it'd be yours," he says. He quite liked Leda, one of his older pieces from before he dropped the classical titles. "I'm sorry I can't – I'm sorry."

“We’re going to fix that,” Enjolras says firmly, but Grantaire is too busy looking past him to cast cynical doubt. He can see Éponine moving through the crowd, elegant in the distance; Bahorel must be somewhere else, and when Grantaire scans the gallery, looking for him, he recognises more faces among the strange ones. Bossuet, relieving a server of half her tray of canapés, Marius's head bobbing, taller than everyone else; Joly frowning at a shrimp cocktail. Musichetta talking to a clump of strangers, resplendent in black lace, and Courfeyrac with a glass of champagne in each hand. Grantaire can't locate Combeferre in the _Where's Waldo_ this crowd has suddenly turned into, but he'd bet cold hard currency that he's somewhere.

"Pretend you don't know them," Enjolras instructs him, noticing him noticing. “They're just working their way into position.”

Jehan turns to smile at him. “That’s my cue. How much of Grantaire's work have you seen?” The warm flush of love Grantaire had been feeling for him dies abruptly. "Only this side?" He checks his phone. "You have to go and see the triptych, you've only got about ten minutes before go time, go _now_."

"Triptych?" Grantaire asks, because while he paints in sets and series, he doesn't often bother with pieces that are meant to hang together; it's not like his agent won't split them up and sell them separately. When it hits him what Jehan must mean, he grabs for Enjolras reflexively. "No, shit –"

"Nine minutes," Jehan says, and Enjolras slips Grantaire's grasp easily. 

Grantaire leaves Jehan at the Adam-Eve-cyborg, careful despite his panic not to walk too fast, not to broadcast any hint of alarm. Enjolras is equally stealthy – actually, probably much stealthier, since the level in his champagne glass hasn't dipped at all – and when Grantaire catches up with him it's too late.

Grantaire doesn't usually do self-portraits, unless it's something from his perspective, an angle that includes his hand holding a cigarette or his thighs disappearing under the edge of a table, a long look from his chin to his toes lying in the bath. He doesn't find his own face as interesting as other people's, and that has nothing to do with self-esteem. He knows what's to be found in it, but other people are a constant mystery.

He doesn't usually paint Enjolras. None of his friends from the old days; his memory isn't exact enough for his own standards, and even he knows it would be unhealthy to resurrect the ABC in ghostly youth over and over again as he gets older and older. He doesn't paint Enjolras, especially. It would be profanity to paint him the way he likes to remember him: not the public moments when everyone was watching, speaking to a crowd or on the quad or, famously, on TV, with a black eye and blood coating his chin. When he draws Enjolras, it's always the private moments Grantaire stole for himself, watching Enjolras under his eyelashes. Half-asleep late in the Musain, frowning at a book, fighting with a soda machine. Lying asleep in Grantaire's bed, just once: vulnerable, naked, dick soft against his thigh. 

Grantaire can't help sketching them sometimes, every line an invasion. Drawing and doodling is an itch he can't control. He never keeps them. They end balled up in his trash, torn to bits, or flaking into white ash with the help of his lighter. He never puts them on canvas, never makes them permanent.

The triptych is an exception, and it's years and years old, it sold half a decade ago, it should not be on show here with his recent stuff. Three paintings, old enough that he was still playing with classical allusion. Three subjects that are blatantly transparent to anyone who knows Grantaire; two self-portraits flanking one of Enjolras, and jesus fuck, he does not want Enjolras to see them.

Enjolras is already standing in front of it. His hands are tucked at his back in unconscious mimicry of Jehan, and he's looking. Grantaire would need an entire fucking sheet to shield this work from him. 

The three of them form a set: _Lethe-drinker, Light-bringer, Lotos-eater._ They’re from a much earlier stage of Grantaire’s development, brushstrokes looser and rougher, with a few spots of hyperreal accuracy that herald his later direction. They’re horribly personal, and if it hadn’t been a bad month with nothing else to show for his money, if it hadn’t been a point when he needed money _badly,_ he would never have let Montparnasse take them. Grantaire’s not sure what he would have done with them otherwise; cut them up, perhaps, or covered them with coats and coats of gesso until their subjects vanished. 

They’re a postmodern mash-up of reference that almost amounts to theft, or at least showing off: _Lethe-drinker_ lifts its pose from Waterhouse’s _Echo and Narcissus_ , the youth hanging over the pool so far that his nose almost touches the surface of the water, transfixed. In Grantaire’s version, the water is wine, the riverbank a gutter, and the boy, his face hidden by hair, is a drunk and untidy sprawl of limbs in modern dress. Its twin, _Lotos-eater_ steals its line of shoulder and tilt of head from the _Young Sick Bacchus_. Instead of a toga, Grantaire’s young man wears a dirty sheet like he's just gotten out of bed. Instead of grapes, he holds the contents of a pomegranate: bloody and glistening red pulp that looks like viscera, torn meat, a heart held in a fist. On the table in front of him – and it’s an obvious self-portrait, just like Caravaggio’s original – the empty pomegranate husk is filled with the small white pills of modern oblivion.

The truly unforgiveable canvas is the middle one.

“Aren’t you going to tell me about these paintings?” Enjolras asks quietly, so low that Grantaire can’t tell if he’s angry or not, and he’s really, really good at telling when Enjolras is angry. It’s his own special superpower, and it’s failing him. 

“What’s to tell?” he says, and gets a sideways look. There’s a knot of people all around him, which limits what Enjolras can do and say to him, a small mercy, and means that whatever Grantaire says is similarly constricted. He can hardly rush into apologies or explanations. He picks up the cue Enjolras has given him. “You want my opinion on these pieces? They’re terrible. Melodramatic, obvious, everything I hate in bad art,” he says, and he means it. He analyses them like they're not his, pointing out the references, patches of bad brushwork, everything he can think of – 

“And that one?” Enjolras asks, tilting his head at the central portrait when Grantaire runs out of things to say about _Lethe-drinker_ and _Lotos-eater._

“That one,” Grantaire says. “Also bad. Very, very bad.”

“The technique is quite good,” Enjolras says dispassionately.

“It's not terrible,” Grantaire allows, and he's never ever been able to hold his tongue for long, so he might as well rattle on and on, past any hope of salvation. “Light-bringer. _Lucifer Apollinem_ , it's one of the attributes of the Roman sun god. _Lux, fero_ – light, carry. Some people think that's – that the early Christians just took it, like they did everything else, and used it for the devil to turn people away from pagan sun-worship, but I'm not totally sure how true that is. But, uh, that's the reference there, in the title, and in the painting – have you seen the engravings Doré did for _Paradise Lost,_ no, of course you haven't, but there's one famous one, where Lucifer's cast out of Paradise–”

“You drew me as _Satan_?”

“Cover,” Grantaire reminds him, and Enjolras blinks twice, shuts up, and steps closer to him. Grantaire can hear him breathing now, the slightly hitched sound of it. He sounds – Grantaire sneaks a sideways glance – no, he _looks_ upset. 

He trips over his own tongue in his rush to explain. “No, of course not, that's the point, there's no Satan in this picture at all, he's meant to be down there somewhere–” he gestures somewhere at floor-level, hard left – “but this is like, a close-up, it cuts him out. There's only Gabriel up there on the hill with some of the host behind him, that's the pose the, uh, the artist's borrowed, he's holding the sword and blocking the way–“

“I don't see a sword.”

“Swords aren't exactly twenty-first century,” Grantaire says. “No breastplate, no wings, no skirt. Just the way he's standing–”

“Looking down,” Enjolras corrects him sharply, and jesus fuck, is he appointing himself an art critic now? Yes, the militant angel is looking down, to the corner where the top of Lucifer's head should be, beautiful and remote and terrible. Grantaire might have been angry when he painted it, he can't remember. It's not a loving portrait, but it's not an insult. If anything, it's a compliment, but from the way Enjolras is looking at it, he doesn't agree.

“I'm sorry you don't like it,” he says, and Enjolras twists to look at him full-on. He’s looking Grantaire like he did after Jehan analysed his work, like he's seeing something different, but this time it's not something on canvas, it's something in Grantaire himself. 

Grantaire looks back. He'd barely been able to look at Enjolras while he babbled on, except for few darting slantwise looks, but now he really _looks._ Grantaire is, as stated, extremely conversant with Enjolras angry, and he can't see any trace of that, which is – he _expected_ Enjolras to be angry. 

A loud beep sounds, and it's coming from the pocket of Enjolras's well-cut jacket. They both look down, and that's it, moment lost.

“Sixty seconds,” Enjolras says, and takes Grantaire's arm. Grantaire lets him lead them, quick but unhurried, a few metres down, where a cluster of Grantaire's works are hanging together. A few smaller canvases, some framed sketches in charcoal and graphite, a few dabs in watercolour – nothing special. The beep comes again. “Forty.”

“You need to tell me _what we are doing_ ,” Grantaire hisses, and Enjolras gives him a tight smile. His lips start moving silently, counting down. 

“...twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one, _twenty_... When my phone beeps again, take as many of these pictures off the wall as you can carry.”

Grantaire gapes at him.

The beep sounds for a fourth time, and Enjolras bursts into action, unhitching works of art from the wall. Grantaire echoes him, a few seconds behind, and from the sudden noise and disturbance around them, it's happening in other places, further and further down the gallery.

“Nothing with a 'sold' sticker!” Éponine calls out, voice carrying clear across the hall, and Enjolras is already moving towards the front doors laden with lifted art, Grantaire trailing after him with a painting tucked under each arm. 

“What the fuck are we _doing_ ,” he yells, and Enjolras calls back over his shoulder, “Repossessing!”

The other members of the ABC are already on their way out, carrying canvases and frames; smaller, portable pieces. The triptych is still safe at the far end of the gallery, too heavy and cumbersome for easy transport. 

“Forgive our intrusion,” Courfeyrac shouts to the confused crowd, stopping at the door, across from where Combeferre is already standing like a sentry, and bows at the waist with a ridiculous flourish of his hands like he's conducting an orchestra. “Our artist has withdrawn his works from public viewing, but never fear, they'll be back in circulation at some later, better date–”

Grantaire and Enjolras are almost the last to leave, and when Grantaire looks back over his shoulder he sees Bahorel close on his heels, and someone he actually kind of recognises from other Patron-Minette-sponsored shows rushing over, his face black with fury – 

Bahorel hustles Grantaire and his burdens into the SUV, into the back seat with Enjolras, and before he slams the door Grantaire catches sight of Combeferre and Courfeyrac moving from their positions at either side of the doors to block the man's progress, Combeferre politely handing him his business card. 

Éponine shouts “Go, _go_ ,” at Bahorel as he throws himself into the driver's seat, the SUV pulls away from the curb with a squeal of tires, and behind them the second SUV does likewise.

“Were we supposed to leave them?” Grantaire hears himself asking, and Enjolras is saying, “They'll be fine, they're trained for this,” and then the whole car explodes into exhilarated, whooping laughter that doesn't stop for blocks and blocks.

“That went well,” Éponine says when it finally tapers off, and it's enough of an understatement that Grantaire starts giggling again, halfway to hysteria.

“Civil disobedience! I thought you were all _respectable_ and respectful of the law these days, citoyen,” he says breathlessly, delirious with the sheer fucking _gall_ of it, the nerve, the absolute _insolence_ , and Enjolras beams just as crazily back at him.

He looks like insurrection incarnate, glorying in mayhem, and Grantaire seizes him by his bowtie and kisses him hard. 

It's less terrifying this time; he's no longer worried Enjolras will be disgusted, but he's still a little worried he might get punched. He really needs to stop doing things before he's thought about them.

Enjolras kisses him back instantly this time, though, biting and eager, and the SUV swerves in the road when Bahorel sees them in his rear vision mirror. 

“–the _fuck,_ ” Éponine says, and Grantaire waggles his fingers at her over Enjolras's shoulder, and they make out in the back seat like teenagers high on adrenaline right until the car pulls up outside _EC &C_.

-

Inside the offices, Bossuet is handing out champagne bottles he somehow managed to liberate at the same time, and everyone is carefully stacking the paintings in Courfeyrac's office, where someone has laid in sheets and bubble wrap in preparation. Courfeyrac had shown up safely a quarter hour after everyone else, in one safe piece and with Combeferre in tow, as jubilant with mischief managed as everyone else. The whole room is fizzing with it, and it's not just the champagne.

Joly passes an open bottle along to Grantaire after taking a swig, and Grantaire takes his own mouthful or two, several, who's counting, and hands it to along to Enjolras. 

Enjolras looks at it like he's been handed a dead dove. Grantaire grins at him and makes a drink gesture with fist, head thrown back. It could be interpreted as miming a blowjob, if you had that kind of filthy mind, and Enjolras goes pink – no, _red_ , patriotic red – and takes a sip.

“There you go,” Bahorel says, clapping him on the shoulder, and Marius finishes swaddling the last canvas.

“Nothing's dented,” he reports. “They all seem to have survived the journey.”

“It's not like it matters,” Grantaire says, because almost none of these things are worthy of the kind of care Musichetta and Jehan and Joly are showing them as they pack them with bubble wrap and linen, handling them like they're precious.

“That's not true,” Enjolras says. “If there are damages, they could come after us –“

“They’re still not yours, I’m sorry,” Combeferre clarifies. “We may yet have to give them back.” 

“More importantly, how _insane_ was that heist,” Courfeyrac breaks in, “was that kicking it old school, or what?”

“I’m just sorry we couldn’t kick it totally old school, set off the smoke bombs as distraction,” Bossuet laments, and Grantaire stares at him.

“That would’ve _destroyed_ –”

"Don't worry," Courfeyrac says brightly, "we decided it was unprofessional."

“We’re all sober and grown up these days,” Joly says sadly, and Bossuet loops an arm around his neck and waves the bottle of champagne.

“Lies! We need to celebrate what’s left of our youth, Jolllly,” he says, and gestures wildly with the neck of the bottle. “Party at Courfeyrac’s?”

“ _Hey._ ”

“Look, our house is full of kids, if we wake them up we’re dead–”

“Courf doesn’t really mind,” Jehan says. “He’s laid in supplies already. He just likes to feel appreciated.”

“Et tu, Prouvaire?” Courfeyrac asks, clutching his chest dramatically. “Fine, _fine_ , party at mine.”

Combeferre hands Enjolras the key to his office. “You and Grantaire had better finish cataloguing what we took, and what we left,” he says, his voice absolutely devoid of any meaning Grantaire can detect, but Enjolras clearly picks something up, because his eyes narrow in almost feline suspicion. “Turn down the heat before you go, and lock the door.”

“Laters,” Bossuet says cheerfully, “we’ll save some booze for you, probably,” and they start to filter out. Grantaire’s pretty sure he’s not the only person who notices Marius’s hand low on Éponine’s back as they leave. 

“Could they make it any more obvious that they’ll be screwing like crazy as soon as possible?” he asks Enjolras rhetorically – once the door’s safely shut.

Enjolras is tapping information into his tablet, and he doesn’t bother to look up. “They’re hardly scandalous these days, Grantaire, they’ve got children.”

“Not Joly and Musichetta,” Grantaire says, sitting on the forbidden territory of Combeferre’s desk, “-or Joly and Bossuet and Musichetta, however they work it out. Marius and Éponine.”

That does get a reaction; Enjolras frowns. “They have to work together – that’s not a good idea.”

“Or maybe I’m imagining things,” Grantaire tells him hurriedly, because he doesn’t want to get Éponine in trouble – Enjolras is her employer, he shouldn’t forget that. “You know how I get. Fevered imagination, wild flights of fancy–”

“However you get, stop swinging your legs and help me with this list. I’ve compared it with the catalogue they were giving out at the gallery – which was woefully inadequate, by the way – and I need to know if there are any lacunae you can fill in.”

“I’m not even going to touch that line, that’s how grateful I am right now,” Grantaire says, obediently un-perching from the desk and taking the tablet, jerking his head at the stacked rows of swaddled canvases across the room. “You should recognise my self-restraint.”

Enjolras shrugs off the compliment. “I’m sorry about the ones we didn’t liberate,” he says. “And the – the triptych, particularly. It wasn’t included in my plan because I’d excluded it from consideration at the outset, due to its size.” He taps the flimsy catalogue booklet in explanation. “If I’d known it was personal, I would have tried harder to make it work.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Grantaire says; this is not a conversation he is going to have. “Seriously, I promise you, it doesn’t matter.”

“It clearly does.”

“They’re relicts,” Grantaire says firmly. “They’re old, they don’t matter anymore. I’ve been selling paintings through Patron-Minette for eight years. There are a lot of paintings out there. I can’t care about them all, or I’d go insane.”

“I’m going to get them back for you–” 

“Don’t _worry_ about it.”

“I know I don’t understand art,” Enjolras says, more carefully, like he’s picking his way through a minefield. Grantaire wonders if kissing him again would shut him up, stop this whole horrifying train of thought. “But those three seemed–”

“The list is fine,” Grantaire says, shoving the tablet back at him. “I didn’t see anything there that I haven’t seen in this office, and vice versa. Can we go now? It’s late, and I seriously doubt the party will be waiting for us for much longer.”

“I’m not – I should go home,” Enjolras says, giving up. “I have to be here as soon as the building opens tomorrow.”

“This is why I chose the dissipate lifestyle of the visual arts,” Grantaire tells him, leaping happily on the change of subject. “No early mornings unless I’m still up from the night before.”

Enjolras is diligent in turning off the heat and locking up: first the door of Combeferre’s office, and then the door from the hallway to the reception itself. It’s a little paranoid, considering that the building’s closed for the night, and no one without a swipe card or a key for the elevator is getting in or out, but whatever makes him happy, Grantaire supposes.

In the elevator, there’s nothing to do but look at the floor numbers changing as it goes down.

“I can give you a ride,” Enjolras says abruptly.

Grantaire’s been very well-behaved, he deserves this one. “Yeah, I bet you can.”

“That's not what I – that is, that's actually what I meant,” Enjolras says. He still doesn't look away from the changing numbers, but his ears are turning red, and Grantaire’s stunned for precious, precious seconds. The doors open at the level of the parking garage.

“Yes,” he says hastily. “I want the ride. But – please, in no way take this the wrong way, isn't the SUV parked on the street?”

Enjolras fishes his keys out of his pocket, still not looking at him. “Do you think I'd customarily drive something that environmentally destructive?” 

A car nearby makes a chirruping unlocking sound, and Grantaire rolls his eyes. Of course not. How foolish of him. “The hybrid is way less sexy, though, I have to say it.”

-

They can hardly make out while Enjolras is driving, so the ride to his place is awkward. Grantaire doesn't seem to know what to do with his mouth around Enjolras when he's not kissing him, he just uses it to annoy him, and Enjolras isn't much better. He's kind of worried that the mood's gone, especially when they don't talk in the elevator up to Enjolras's floor, either, and Enjolras himself doesn't seem to know what to say once they're inside, like this was a sudden decision he made without thinking, too, high on adrenaline and triumph and against the whispering of his better angel. 

“This is–” he says, and gestures around him kind of helplessly, like the room can introduce itself. His apartment is sleekly modern and extremely tiny, and it looks like it would be messy if he ever spent actual time in it. Looking around Enjolras's living room-cum-kitchen, Grantaire can see why dinner was held at Combeferre's; there's no actual table, just stools pulled up to the island that separates the kitchen from the couches.

“Where do you want me?” Grantaire asks, and Enjolras looks even more lost.

“We should talk,” he says. “Before anything. There's a lot–”

“No,” Grantaire interrupts him firmly. “We can talk in the morning, but if we do that now, it's going to – it's going to be a mess, and I just want – The past is the past, but right now we won this round, come on. That was amazing, and you're brilliant, you're a genius, you're _brilliant,_ please please please take your fucking jacket off and let me suck your dick before you talk us both out of it.”

Apparently unable to come up with anything to say to that, Enjolras simply shucks his jacket, letting it drop carelessly to the carpet. The line of his throat moves when he swallows, a nervous reflex that escapes his usually iron control. Grantaire wants to lick it, so he steps closer and does exactly that. 

When he gets around to kissing Enjolras this time, it's nothing like the frantic, triumphant making out in the car. That was hard and hot and open-mouthed; this is careful.

The very first time he'd kissed Enjolras had been careful. Grantaire hadn't quite been able to believe that Enjolras had really asked him to, and he'd been certain that any second he'd pull away and reveal that it had only been a game, or maybe a really, really convincing hallucination. His apparent chastity had been a running joke for all four years of college, but Grantaire just hadn't been able to get his head around the fact that Enjolras really hadn't kissed anyone ever, let alone that he was asking _Grantaire_ to teach him. Even if he'd made it sound like an overdue issue that had come up yet again on the ABC agenda and should probably be attended to as soon as possible, rather than 'O Grantaire, ravish me, I yearn for you', it had felt like an hallucination.

Enjolras tilts his head for him and lets Grantaire work for it like he did that first time, but then he gets involved, his hands coming up to rest flat against Grantaire's shirtfront.

“Pushing me away already?” Grantaire asks. It's not a very amusing piece of banter, given their history, but he's not truly worried; Enjolras is still leaning in for more, head dipping down and down. 

“Pushing you _along_ ,” Enjolras corrects him, and bends down for another kiss. He's moving forward with intent, and Grantaire lets him, lets Enjolras herd him across the brief length of the room and down the briefer length of a hall Grantaire notices nothing about whatsoever, and then they're in Enjolras's bedroom, and okay, Grantaire can take it from here.

He backs Enjolras up until the back of his knees hit the edge of his bed. “Can I,” he asks, and gestures. “Will you let me?”

“I took my jacket off,” Enjolras points out, and the corner of his mouth lifts.

Grantaire is going to suck his dick, and Enjolras is going to let him, and he is going to do it so well that Enjolras is completely and totally incapable of being such a fucking – such a lawyer. “You're so lucky I don't have time to make you beg me to suck you off,” he mutters, but he's all talk. If there's going to be begging between them, it won't be Enjolras. 

It's a pure and distinct pleasure to drop to his knees in front of him, to be permitted to unbuckle his belt, to hear Enjolras's breathing catch when Grantaire works his pants open and pushes them down his hips. The delirious happiness from the car comes bubbling back up, the sense of shocking exultation and unexpected success. 

Enjolras sits down as soon as Grantaire has got his pants and briefs most of the way past his hips, which isn't entirely what Grantaire had been planning – he likes the idea of Enjolras looming tall over him – but if he's more comfortable on the bed, whatever. Grantaire's not going to look a gift horse in the dick, not when he wants that dick in his mouth, like, _yesterday._

Enjolras draws a hard breath through his nose when Grantaire finally gets his mouth on him, and his hands settle in Grantaire's hair; at first light and uncertain, and then more confidently, sliding through curls to warm scalp. 

He tastes a little like saltwater and a lot like clean human male. Grantaire forces reactions from him, coaxes them out of him, glories in the trembling muscle of his thighs under Grantaire's spread palms, in the moans he draws from somewhere so deep in Enjolras's throat it sounds like they've been hooked out from under his breastbone. 

He could draw this out forever, but eventually Enjolras decides differently. 

Enjolras was never less than careful with him before, but his hands turn rough in Grantaire's hair now, and the slight edge of pain burns away whatever actual mental process Grantaire had been running, sending his thoughts scattering into a thousand directions like a bead necklace burst apart. He sucks harder, fiercer, and the increased pull on his hair seems like encouragement until the fact that Enjolras is trying to tug him away finally penetrates. 

He protests going, but Enjolras pulls him mercilessly up by his hair to kiss him, and whatever argument Grantaire was going to make just burns away in a flash of pure need. 

It's off the map and un-choreographed after that: he lets Enjolras pull him down to the bed, on top of him, and they make out until it becomes clear that Grantaire still needs to take his clothes off. He fumbles out of Courfeyrac's poor borrowed suit with no grace whatsoever, but at least Enjolras is still trying to shed his own shirt, to kick off the pants hooked around one ankle: no one is winning any prizes for smoothness.

“Have you got anything?” It's the first thing either of them has said for a while, and Grantaire's voice is rough. 

“Nothing, no, I'm out of practice,” Enjolras says breathlessly, and when he starts to explain or apologise for the lack of supplies, Grantaire shuts him up with his tongue. Just kissing him skin to skin is fine, more than fine; once Grantaire takes advantage of his distraction to push him back onto his back and then roll them over, once Enjolras is on top of him where he belongs, rocking together with nothing between them is more than enough to get him there.

-

Grantaire rolls away, afterwards. Enjolras may be out of practice, but he's not; he knows how this works. 

The first time he'd brought Enjolras to surprised climax back in his student dive of an apartment, Enjolras had actually thanked him. Grantaire had known by then that it wasn't a joke, but he'd still laughed incredulously. “Are you kidding? You don't need to thank _me_ ,” he'd told him, and it'd been mostly surreal and a little hilarious, only a fraction bitter. It hadn't been like he was helping Enjolras experiment out of the pure kindness of his heart, in the brief and occasional bursts Enjolras found time for it, among his classes and his meetings and his work. There had been a reason Enjolras enlisted his particular aid, after all. 

The one and only time Enjolras had fallen asleep in his bed it had been an accident; they weren't dating, they didn't do afterglow. It had been just before the first of the rolling protests after the unjust firing of Lamarque, and Enjolras had already been exhausted, worn thin from the effort of trying to be in a dozen places, to hold the whole crumbling enterprise together with his own hands. He'd needed something to stop him jittering apart himself, and Grantaire had taken it upon himself to provide it. 

He'd used the intimacy to argue his way into being given some responsibility, to take some of the pressure off Enjolras's shoulders, show that he could join in with the rest of the ABC when it really counted; and then he'd screwed it up. Enjolras trusting him with his body had been one thing, but his cause was something Enjolras considered far more important, and trusting Grantaire with it had meant far more – more, maybe, than giving Grantaire back a fraction of the idiotic adoration Grantaire couldn't help vomiting all over him, something that he'd been young and stupid and greedy enough to want as well, even though he'd known Enjolras didn't work like that, couldn't give it. 

This time Enjolras is still awake, not dead with fatigue, and he grabs for Grantaire's wrist when Grantaire tries to sit up. “You should stay.” When Grantaire doesn't say anything, long moment after moment, he adds, “I need you in the offices first thing tomorrow morning. It'll be easier if you just stay now, and come in with me.”

It's also easier to agree. “Okay,” Grantaire says, and tries again to pull his wrist free. “I'm just going to the bathroom, relax.”

Bathrooms are bad places for him, and have been for a long time. Enjolras's bathroom isn't any different, and Grantaire doesn't meet his own eyes in the mirror. He pisses, washes his hands, and then rubs at his teeth with Enjolras's toothpaste – it feels wrong to steal his toothbrush, even if Grantaire's completely and thoroughly intimate with the contours of his mouth. When he finds a washcloth he pads back out into the bedroom, still brilliant with light.

He locates the switch and plunges it into darkness; Enjolras doesn't protest, and he barely responds when Grantaire gets back into bed, half-asleep already. Grantaire disturbs him enough to clean up, running the cloth over chest and stomach and the adonis line of his hips, and tries desperately to shove away that terrible heart-liquefying fondness that's the return of hope.

Which would be stupid. It's not lost on Grantaire that Enjolras didn't brief him on the gallery plan in full beforehand. He can appreciate why, given his track record, and he can even agree that it was a good decision. He would've been a nervous mess, and they would have attracted a security guard tail shortly after arriving. Probably. It shouldn't sting.

At least, whatever fall out there is – and Grantaire's expecting some; he knows Enjolras didn't think about this before he offered, didn't calculate – it can't be worse. The stakes are less terrifying; Grantaire's expectations are _zero_ , so he can't be disappointed, and there's no fragile trust placed into his hands to betray. 

-

In the morning they're awkward again. Enjolras is up and dressed before Grantaire struggles out of bed and into his crumpled pants – he is _never_ telling Courfeyrac what these pants have borne witness to – and lends him a clean shirt out of pity when he finds Grantaire batting helplessly at his borrowed jacket, trying to straighten it out.

There's no edible food and bad coffee in Enjolras's tiny kitchen, which breaks all the rules of good hook-up etiquette, and Grantaire tells him so. Volubly.

“I can't believe you don't own a coffee machine,” he laments. “Reduced to pouring filter coffee from a pot, like an _animal_ –”

Enjolras seems to be finding his struggles with the primitive plunger funny, but once Grantaire has a full cup, he pushes away from the bench and catches Grantaire's flailing wrist. “We still have to talk.”

“Yes, okay, but not _now,_ ” Grantaire says around a mouthful of the weak mockery Enjolras calls caffeine. “Aren't you late? Shouldn't we be leaving?”

Enjolras drops his arm and starts wildly hunting for his briefcase, his tablet, his phone, his keys. Grantaire takes up his abandoned space against the bench and watches him. Getting to see Enjolras like this, under-caffeinated and panicky and completely not put together, tearing the cushions off his sofa, it’s a stalker’s wet dream, a window into the domestic.

Enjolras takes a few sharp corners on the way into work, too, and really, he's not _that_ late. Even without rushing, he'll be there by eight, which is frankly ridiculous; no one is crazy enough to schedule meetings that early except him, and he can't have a meeting with himself, he'll go blind. Grantaire tells him this, too, and gets ignored. “Are you really going to turn into a pumpkin if you don't get there before the clock strikes?”

“That's the time the building opens,” Enjolras says, taking another corner. “I want to be there.”

The parking level isn't open yet, so they park on the street. Right behind Marius, it turns out, who's locking up some hideous and suburban Ford; does no one at this firm drive the kind of car befitting the legal profession? Courfeyrac had better drive something sleek and shiny, or Grantaire will be seriously disappointed in him.

Marius visibly fumbles his keys when he sees Grantaire get out of Enjolras's car, but Enjolras nods at him and Marius falls into step behind them, trailing them like the lost puppy he still is. 

“Discipline is a beautiful thing,” Grantaire remarks, and gets weird looks from both of them. Enjolras looks away, striding ahead, but Marius keeps staring. He tilts his head at Enjolras's oblivious back and makes some kind of screwed-up face.

Grantaire amuses himself by making one back. He intends it to convey _don't even start with me, I know who you're boning on the down-low,_ but something must get lost in translation, because Marius looks a little frightened and scuttles to catch up with Enjolras.

It's two minutes past eight, and the building's electric doors slide open for them easily. Inside the lobby, the dishwater-blond kid that Grantaire's seen minding the reception desk at _EC &C_ a few times is leaning back against the wall, still messing around on his phone, to all intents and purposes completely oblivious to their existence.

“All clear?” Enjolras asks him as he passes.

“So far,” the kid says, and Enjolras nods and sweeps past him to the elevator. 

Close up, he's not quite the teenager he seems. Early twenties, maybe, but he gives the impression of being younger. It's an illusion backed up with round, guileless blue eyes and a faintly snub nose. He glances at Marius when he passes, and visibly hesitates. "Nothing You-Know-Who related, but there's something–" 

The elevator doors close.

Then they open: amazingly, Enjolras is not the first one here this morning. 

There's a small figure sitting in the _EC &C_ reception, head bent in focus on her book and a heavy knot of gilt-bronze hair coiled at the base of her neck. The light catches on the pearls trembling at her earlobes when she turns her head at the sound of the elevator, and at the sight of them she lifts her chin. 

It's a small, determined, and very familiar chin. 

Marius makes a strangled sound, and something clicks together in Grantaire’s head, like puzzle pieces locking into place: Marius telling him that he'd been working at _EC &C_ for six months, that six months was the length of Cosette's survey.

-

That's Shoe Number One. Shoe Number Two drops barely half an hour later, when Montparnasse shows up with Claquesous and a motley array of lawyers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For reference: Waterhouse's [Echo and Narcissus](http://i.imgur.com/iVYThZO.jpg), Caravaggio's [Young Sick Bacchus](http://i.imgur.com/zMtSeBh.jpg)*, and Doré's [Lucifer Yielding Before Gabriel](http://i.imgur.com/N57Pntv.jpg).
> 
> *Grantaire's self-portrait would be way less yellow, that was _not_ the dude's best look.


	7. Chapter 7

The third shoe drops later, twenty minutes into the meeting with Patron-Minette, when Claquesous metaphorically tosses it into the center of the conference table like a latter day apple of discord. (There’s always a third shoe. The average human being might only have two feet, but fate favours threes, and Grantaire has the worst luck. Three crows make a murder, and three deaths complete a pattern.)

Cosette’s appearance is simply the first punch, and it meets its target squarely. Marius stares at her with shock and longing written all over his face; he looks and looks at her like she's breaking his heart, but looking away would make it stop completely. 

“You can have twenty minutes,” Enjolras tells him crisply when Cosette asks Marius if they can talk. “I have to brief Grantaire, and I want you to sit in. Send Éponine to me when she arrives.”

“Brief me?” Grantaire asks, amused, when they've left the Fauchelevent-Pontmercys in the reception and turned into Enjolras’s office. “Is that a euphemism, or what?”

He gets a look for that, half-reproving, half-amused, as Enjolras shuts the door firmly behind them. “Be serious.” 

Grantaire throws himself onto his now-favourite chair and gives Enjolras his filthiest, flirtiest look. “Can’t be tamed,” he says cheerfully. It's an invitation to come sit in his lap and try, but Enjolras doesn't take it.

Enjolras still looks a little sleep-rumpled, but his posture has changed, shoulders stiffening. The easiness of the morning and the manic energy of last night are gone. It's probably some strange alchemy of being back in his office, in this very formal setting, where he's squared off against Grantaire half-a-dozen times – Grantaire can't quite believe it, himself. It's so hard to reconcile this room with the fact that he'd just come from Enjolras's bed – jesus, his _bed_. Jesus, _Enjolras._

“This is why we should have talked last night,” Enjolras says, running his fingers through his hair, a gesture that Grantaire is beginning to recognise as one he uses when he's frustrated, or as a placeholder when searching for the right words. “I should have – I shouldn't have, and I'm sorry, but you can’t do that right now.”

“Do what? Flirt with you?” Grantaire laughs, but whatever lingering shreds of afterglow he’d been holding onto are rapidly dissipating. This sounds like another verse of _this didn't happen, let's forget_ , and if Enjolras tries that on him he'll actually punch him this time. “I always flirt with you, Apollo.”

“Yes, and it's always– Look, obviously we still need to talk about everything, but that has to wait. Marius’s distraction is bad enough–” Hilariously, Enjolras sounds like Marius had entangled himself in messy personal affairs just to irritate him. “But today of all days, there has to be a separation between our professional interactions and our – our personal ones. We need to – do you know what a Chinese wall is?”

He ignores Grantaire’s glib answer (“A wall? In China?”), and painstakingly explains the concept, and Grantaire slouches lower in his seat, thanking Enjolras’s usually-annoying didacticism for the stay of execution from whatever form the _we can't do this, I'm your lawyer_ speech is going to take, or worse still, the threatened excavation of the past. 

Enjolras glances at his watch – he still wears a watch, jesus, why does that detail turn Grantaire on? – and begins a lightning-fast briefing on what they might expect from Patron-Minette in retaliation for last night’s raid, anything from a nasty letter to legal action – 

“I really don’t think they want to go to court,” Enjolras adds reassuringly.

Grantaire makes incredulous noises; couldn’t Enjolras have told him there was a possibility that Patron-Minette might claim a serious breach of contract and sue for damages _before_ he ordered Grantaire to start pulling down canvases? 

Enjolras continues to ignore him. “They prefer the skull-and-dagger approach. We drew attention last night; not from just their higher-up’s, but their hangers-on, the general public – this isn’t something that can be stifled, so we can expect an equal or greater reaction now that they know we’re not going to shut up or go away. I very much doubt that they’ll file and serve proceedings. It’s about the last thing they want.”

“Okay, but _why,_ ” Grantaire asks. He’s asked it before, and he actually stands a chance in hell of getting a real answer now, with one eye on the clock and a pistol to their head. “Why do they care? What do a few shitty canvases have to do with anything?”

“We think they’re using their gallery connections and art auctions to launder money from their more unsavoury operations,” Enjolras tells him, and before he can say more, before Grantaire can do more than blink, mental map reorienting in a new pattern, Marius bursts through the door.

“You’re late–”

Marius just straight-out cuts Enjolras off, breathless. “They’re here.” 

-

The whole meeting is a clusterfuck, beginning to end. Grantaire is seedy and unwholesome in yesterday’s crumpled suit and stubble, Marius is in a state of emotional turbulence, Éponine is missing, and Enjolras is irritated, thrown off by Montparnasse’s arrival a full half hour before _EC &C_’s business hours officially began, before he had time to brief his client or his associate. 

“Don’t say _anything,_ ” he hisses at Grantaire before they go in. “I’ll do the talking.”

The conference room is still small and claustrophobic, and under its bright incandescent lights Grantaire feels shabby and sordid. His palms are sweating, and Montparnasse is smirking at him across the table, darkly handsome and impeccably put together, looking like he knows Grantaire’s every dirty secret, like he can see straight through his clothes to the traces of Enjolras’s mouth and fingers on him.

Montparnasse doesn’t do any talking either. He lets his lawyers, led by Claquesous, speak for him, and slouches in his seat with more louche grace than Grantaire had managed.

Claquesous himself doesn’t stop speaking, despite Enjolras’s best efforts; oleaginous and vaguely threatening, he dances around the possibility of an actual lawsuit that Enjolras keeps bringing up to hammer away at Patron-Minette’s lease rights to Grantaire’s unsold work, and the possibility of the gallery breach rendering the whole contract null and void, hinting darkly at the Faustian consequences of that nullification.

Grantaire already knows them. There’s a giant fuck-off punitive clause written into the stupid thing, in case of breach or withdrawal on his part; he gets his freedom, but he gives up all rights to his existing work, he shuts the fuck up about Patron-Minette forever, and he gives them almost more money than he has at this point, and he has a lot.

“Given your client’s record,” Claquesous says fastidiously, like Grantaire’s name dirties his mouth, “his probity in this instance is open to doubt. He wishes simply for his artistic freedom? He wishes to show his works at other galleries, out of a pure desire for critical recognition? Our very generous exhibition opportunities are not enough for his ego–”

“It’s not about money,” Grantaire breaks in angrily, and Enjolras turns on him like a tiger.

“Don’t _talk_ —”

“If it’s not about money, then M. Grantaire is happy to pay the opt-out clause?” 

“Of course not,” Enjolras says. “Disproportionate and unsupported financial demands aside, my client has no intention of signing over his rights to his body of work, or of signing any gag order, or of agreeing to your _outrageous_ demand that he ceases artistic production for the space of a year, which is completely unacceptable–”

“We must protect our existing investment,” Claquesous says. “Surely you can understand that our exclusive rights to M. Grantaire’s existing work will be harshly devalued if he is free to dilute the market with new works immediately–”

“No way in _hell,_ ” Grantaire says, unable to stop himself: resisting the urge to throw his glass of water at Claquesous is taking up all of his available self-control. “Like _fuck_ am I going on hiatus for a year–”

“I suggest, given your client’s reputation,” Claquesous continues, ostensibly ignoring Grantaire’s outburst, although one side of his thin mouth curls into a satisfied smile; “I _suggest_ that your client wishes to terminate his contractual responsibilities because he thinks he can make more money elsewhere, I understand that he has expensive, how would you say, tastes–”

He says it like a man taking the pin from a grenade just before he throws it, standing back and waiting for the explosion. 

That’s the third shoe. Grantaire presses his nails into his palms and doesn’t give him the satisfaction, but beside him Enjolras has gone dangerously still and quiet.

“What _are_ you suggesting, precisely?”

Claquesous coughs delicately, then takes a careful sip of water, drawing it out, and Montparnasse smirks at his shoulder. “Are you familiar with his record? Let's see–” He shuffles some paper, but doesn't bother looking down. “Drunk and disorderlies, quite a few of those, going back, oh, fifteen, sixteen years; hospital records, _multiple_ possession charges that got dismissed on various grounds, but they're rather interesting, aren't they?”

Grantaire doesn't bother pointing out that Claquesous has excellent records of the latter precisely because Patron-Minette's legal team had been responsible for making those arrests go away. He doesn't need Enjolras's hand tight on his arm to keep his mouth shut.

“I think we'll adjourn for the day,” Enjolras says. “My client and I will need time to discuss your offer, and I suggest you spend some time thinking about ours. In the meantime–”

It's over soon after that, somehow; Claquesous and his silent, note-taking juniors file out, with Montparnasse last in their train. He smiles at Grantaire on his way out; it’s a conspirator’s smile, with a hint of smugness, like he knows something Grantaire doesn’t. He still hasn't said a single word.

Enjolras doesn't say anything, either, until the last Patron-Minette personage has left the _EC &C_ offices. He follows them out, down the hall and through the reception, Grantaire drawn helplessly along in his wake like a piece of sea-wrack.

When the elevator doors close Grantaire can see Enjolras counting under his breath again. He’s holding himself straight and taut, eyes shut, visibly waiting. His hands have curled in unconscious fists again. 

Grantaire's afraid of the moment when that countdown stops, but he can't do anything to stop it; the elevator numbers above the doors count ineluctably down until Patron-Minette's stoolpigeons are safely out of reach on the ground floor.

Enjolras opens his eyes and looks at him. His face is a line from Tennyson that Grantaire's never forgotten; faultlessly faultless, icily regular, splendidly null. “Give me your wrist,” he says, and before Grantaire can, he takes it, tearing at the button at Grantaire's borrowed cuff and forcing his sleeve up. 

Grantaire's own private countdown has stopped too. It's the one he's been half-keeping since he came in from the cold and presented himself in Courfeyrac's office; it's the long-awaited break in the tension that's been slowly racketing up for days upon days; it's the knowledge that, like some twisted law of thermodynamics, this forward motion, this upward movement into the warmth of the old days and old friends necessitated some equal and opposite reaction. 

Enjolras is examining the crook of his elbow for track marks, his fingertips warm and personal and his eyes utterly cold, and suddenly Grantaire can't bear it. 

“That is _not_ covered under attorney-client privilege,” he snaps, tearing it back and rolling his sleeve down. There's nothing to find, anyway; any scars are long-faded, over eight years old, from the blank years between college and meeting Montparnasse. 

“What are you taking,” Enjolras snaps back, and it's not even a question.

“Nothing! I'm clean! I've been clean for like, eighteen months, that's why I'm _here._ And I haven't fucking injected myself with anything in close to a decade, but jesus, your mind went straight there, didn't it? You _shit,_ ” Grantaire says, voice rising, and okay, fuck it all, he's going all in. Marius is staring at them from the hallway, appalled, and one of the secretaries is actually sitting at the reception desk – window-dressing for Claquesous, probably – and she's staring, too. “What the fuck do you think I am, some total junkie? I may be a drunk and a loser, but my vices are respectable bourgeois ones these days.”

“How should I know?” Enjolras says, glaring back at him. “What standards am I supposed to think you've kept? You've prostituted your art and corrupted your body–”

“Fuck you,” Grantaire hisses back. “Speak for yourself, you always said you'd never go into private practice, who's the real whore here–”

Enjolras is absolutely white to the lips. Grantaire's heard the expression before, but never seen it. He stares at Grantaire like he's too angry to even speak, Enjolras, of all people, and Grantaire stares back, opens his mouth – to apologise or heap more fuel on the fire, he's not sure – 

“What is _going on_ ,” someone, Combeferre, is demanding. “Have you both gone completely insane?” 

Their audience has expanded. Éponine’s there too, drawn out by the noise, and when Enjolras sees her he rounds on her. 

“I just got sandbagged by Patron-Minette. Were you aware Grantaire had drug-related criminal and medical records? Isn't it _your_ job to find that sort of background on a client, to prevent exactly what just happened? I can’t do _my_ job if I don’t have the facts. I can’t do my _job_ if I have less information than the other side. Are you unable to do your job, or did you deliberately suppress these facts?”

“They didn't seem relevant to simple litigation,” Éponine says, and Grantaire remembers her promising that she operated on a need-to-know basis, that she'd protect his worst and most private secrets. “It seemed like a simple contractual issue at first–”

“There is _nothing_ simple about this case,” Enjolras interrupts, and his voice starts low but ends on a shout. Éponine looks like he’s slapped her, eyes black in her blanched face.

“That's enough,” Combeferre says quietly, stepping forward. “That's more than enough.”

“Did you know?” Enjolras asks him, conversational again, and the look Éponine and Combeferre share is apparently confirmation enough for him. “Everyone just decided to throw out standard practice? Was there some kind of consensus? M. Grantaire is a special case, forget about professional requirements, impartial judgment, basic professionalism?”

Grantaire's never seen Combeferre – well-controlled Combeferre, Enjolras's better half, his steadying rudder – truly angry before, but he's seeing it now. Apparently anger makes Combeferre quieter and more incisive still.

“ _Apparently_ ,” he says, and looks from Enjolras to Grantaire and back again with the precision of a rapier point going home. “Is your own judgment uncompromised by personal considerations right now? Perhaps you should think carefully about why you’re so angry.”

Someone takes an audible breath, and Grantaire thinks, stupidly, oh no you didn’t, and Enjolras is white-lipped again.

“Marius, take Grantaire to your office and finish briefing him properly, please,” Combeferre says. “Everyone else, back to work. Enjolras, we should talk.”

“I have a right to be angry,” Enjolras says softly. “I can’t do my job if I’m not informed.”

Combeferre nods incrementally, allowing that much. “You do, and I’m sorry.”

“We'll have to talk about it later. I have other cases to worry about right now. Marius can take point on this one.”

“Very well,” Combeferre agrees, and then looks around the reception with gentle astonishment. “Why are you all still here?”

The general dispersal after that resembles a flock of sparrows once a cat’s appeared among them. Grantaire finds himself in Marius’s office at the end of it, somehow, collapsed into a chair, and they stare at each other.

“Fuck this day,” he says blankly.

“Amen,” Marius says, and it comes out like a prayer in his deep boy’s voice. 

They sit and stare at each other some more, minute after minute, until Grantaire huffs out something that’s almost a laugh. His hands are shaking again. “I need a drink.”

“We have water? Tea? There’s a coffee pot in the corner?”

“That’s completely not what I meant,” Grantaire says, but he looks at the coffee pot. Marius’s interrogatives are contagious. “Seriously? _Filter coffee_? Is everyone who works here utterly insane?”

The inanity of it makes him laugh some, actually, and then he remembers Enjolras’s tiny kitchenette barely two hours ago, and the laugh becomes something broken-backed.

“I can go get you espresso?” Marius offers uselessly, and Grantaire keeps laughing. It’s a terrible ragged noise, and it’s attracting looks. Marius’s office is not an office as much as it is a partition; as a lowly associate, he shares the room with another associate and two legal secretaries, all of whom are carefully ignoring them as though they hadn’t just been listening to the pyrotechnics.

“I usually use the conference room with clients,” Marius says, catching Grantaire’s wild and wandering eye, “but of course you don’t count.”

“Thank you for that, Pontmercy,” Grantaire says. The terrible hysterics peter out. “It only needed that.” 

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing,” Grantaire says; he doesn’t even have the energy to tease him. Marius looks as wrung-out as Grantaire feels, and it’s out of a sudden surge of brotherly feeling that he adds, “Do we have to do this here? I need a _real_ drink.”

-

That Grantaire ultimately ends up in a little uptown wine bar called Corinthe with Marius Pontmercy sobbing drunkenly on his shoulder is therefore entirely his own fault.

“So, seriously, what _happened,_ ” Grantaire asks him when Marius is halfway into his second glass and beginning to sound lachrymose. If he thinks about Enjolras or Claquesous or Montparnasse or the giant fucking mess everything is right now, Grantaire will do something violent and stupid, or maybe just drink until he passes out; it’s actually the wiser, better choice to get Marius wasted and crack him down the middle like an oyster. “With Cosette? Why did she show up today, why did – what happened in the first place, why the fuck did she go to Sarajevo in the first fucking place?”

“Sarawak,” Marius corrects him punctiliously, ponderous with red wine. “She wanted to _talk_. I wanted – I didn’t want to talk. And I don’t know what happened. We were so _happy_.”

“Yeah, but you must know,” Grantaire says. He tosses back the rest of his glass. “Come on, talk me through it. She didn’t just up and leave for Sara– whatever, out of the blue. Right? That kind of stuff, I mean, that takes organising. There must have been warning signs. Something.”

Marius shakes his head, but it’s mulish protest, not denial. “We were so happy,” he repeats. “We didn’t get married until she finished college. Her father made us wait until she was twenty-one. I went to law school, she went to grad school – we lived in the co-op – we were happy. Then I got my first real job at a local firm – Courfeyrac used to work there, he recommended me. He was an associate there too, until he got tired of not being made partner and he and Enj– and the others started up _EC &C_.”

“Long hours,” Grantaire suggests helpfully, extrapolating, “must have fucked you up,” but Marius shakes his head again. 

“No, it was fine. She was working long hours, too. We bought our first house a few years into my first job, did you– No, you never saw it. We invited you to the wedding,” Marius adds reproachfully, and Grantaire shrugs off the implied scolding. 

The wedding had been two years after Grantaire left college, and while he'd lingered in contact with the others for a little while after that, there was no way he was going to watch Marius and Cosette exchange vows. Marius and Cosette's first house must have been another two or three years after _that_ , and at that point, Grantaire had already cut all lines of communication, filled the metaphorical moat with burning pitch and pulled up the drawbridge. 

“Jehan called it the Dovecote, because he’s Jehan, but it was the perfect house. Our perfect little house. It wasn’t big, but we had a backyard, and Cosette had a garden, and I had a dog–” Something bad must have happened to the dog, because Marius hiccups half-tearfully. 

Grantaire pats him awkwardly on the shoulder and signals for another bottle. He wants to hear about Cosette, not some flea-bitten puppy, but Marius gets caught up in telling Grantaire about him, pulling out his phone to show him photos like Musichetta showed off her children. It’s completely unshocking on any level that Marius’s beloved companion was a golden retriever.

“He was such a good dog,” Marius says, staring down at his phone: lolling-tongued and melting-eyed, the dog stares back. “Bonaparte. He used to make Cosette so cross, digging up her flowers and her herb garden–”

It would be a real twist in the tale if their marriage broke up over Cosette poisoning Marius’s precious pup, Grantaire thinks, but there’s no way he’s that lucky. 

He can almost see the whole thing in his head like a soft-tinted movie as Marius rambles on. The young husband working virtuously all day and coming home at night, going for runs around the block with the dog; the young wife – well, not homemaking, and not welcoming her husband home with a hot meal, but working in a lab or a greenhouse somewhere, neat in a white coat and plastic gloves, and working in her garden in the weekends, making mint tea with home-grown herbs, and training jasmine around the arbor at their door. The whole thing is just so wholesome that it makes Grantaire sick. If he didn’t know it all ended in tears and Marius’s flushed pink miserable face, he’d be retching somewhere or casting a witch’s curse on their happiness. Grantaire is a professional cynic: he doesn’t believe in happily ever after.

He could have told them back in college that it was never going to work out and saved them a lot of heartbreak and trouble.

“You _did,_ ” Marius says, when Grantaire shares this thought with him. “When I came into the Musain and told everyone about the wonderful girl I’d just met, you told me that love at first sight wasn’t real; when I said we were getting engaged, you laughed so hard you fell off your barstool–”

“Have another drink,” Grantaire suggests, when Marius starts to sound more aggrieved than reminiscent. “Tell me about when it started going wrong.”

“So you can tell me that you told me so?” Marius asks, with a rare show of spirit. His chin has a pugnacious shape to it when it wants it to, and, despite the smatter of freckles, the bridge of his nose is made for looking down. It's a shame that he spends most of his time pulling muppet faces when he could probably tap into his patrician lineage and work up some serious hauteur. “I keep telling you – it didn’t go wrong, exactly. Cosette’s father moved back to New York shortly after we got married, and I know she missed him, but we were busy, and everything was fine, and honestly – it was nice having some space to ourselves.”

“I bet,” Grantaire says. M. Valjean had been the most over-involved father he'd ever met, and he'd barely known him; the guy had moved all the way out from New York to be near Cosette while she was in college, to provide her with a home instead of a dorm. Stepping back to give the newlyweds some privacy is more than Grantaire had expected of him, and he's genuinely surprised that Valjean didn't deliberately engineer the separation, somehow, showing up on their doorstep every day to borrow a cup of sugar and remind Cosette that her bedroom at home was always there. 

“About four years ago, he got sick,” Marius continues, a wrinkle forming squarely between his eyebrows. “It turned into rheumatic fever, and then he had a weak heart, so Cosette and I moved out there to be with him. That's when it started, I suppose. We sold the house, I quit my job, we gave away our dog–”

“I _knew_ Papa Valjean had to be involved somehow!” 

Marius gives him another reproachful look. “He didn't get sick on purpose. He came to like me, once Cosette and I moved there – I actually think the more Jean liked me, the less Cosette did.”

Ding ding ding, _daddy issues,_ Grantaire thinks, but he keeps it to himself this time and nods understandingly. He could totally be a relationship counsellor if the painting thing is fucked forever for him. He'd have to be allowed to use alcohol in his therapy, though; it's doing _marvels_ for Marius.

“We were so alone out there,” Marius tells his empty wine glass, and Grantaire fills it for him. “All our friends were back here, or scattered around – we had each other, we had Jean, but. Have you tried making friends? It’s _hard_. I don’t remember it being so hard in college. We just – once I met Bossuet, and Courfeyrac, and then all the rest of you – it just clicked. Everything was just easy. Meeting Cosette – all I had to do was see her, and I knew I would love her for the rest of my life. That was it. I don’t think I ever noticed until we moved to New York that we never really made any other real friends after college. Of course I met people, we had acquaintances, but they just – they never keep. Have you noticed that?”

It sounds incredibly trite, but Grantaire understands exactly what Marius is trying to say, in his broken hiccup-y way. He’s felt the same way himself. Everything had just fallen effortlessly into place back then, and felt _right_ , complete and eternal, but it hadn’t stayed that way, and nothing has ever come close since. Grantaire’s never been able to replace those friendships, and he’s thought that was a flaw in him – that maybe he was just too broken, beyond fixing, beyond normal human relationships. It’s almost a relief to realise that it’s the same for Marius, that it might even be the same for the others.

“Oh, it is,” Marius agrees, when Grantaire shares this thought, too. “We’ve all talked about it. Like, maybe we were too close? I know it’s why Courfeyrac finally left his old firm, and Combeferre, Bossuet claims it’s why he can’t stick to a job, and Feuilly keeps coming back, as far away as he goes – It’s different for Jehan and Musichetta, they have to be social, with their colleagues in the faculty, they're closer. Musichetta holds dinner parties – Courfeyrac’s banned from them, actually.”

“What did he do, get drunk and piss in a vase?” 

Grantaire’s honestly surprised. Courfeyrac is amiable and charming, a naturally social animal even outside the charmed circle of the ABC, and a natural fill-in at any mixer or dinner party. He can see Musichetta bringing him in as an interesting addition, to stop the discussion getting too academic and stale, but not banning him. 

“He keeps seducing her grad students. Well, mostly Jehan’s, but a few of hers. And then he breaks up with them – he’s not serious about any of it, you know Courf – and they _cry_ , and it upsets their work, and Jehan has to deal with it and help them pull themselves back together, and he gets mad, and stop laughing, R, it’s not funny.”

“It _is_ funny, actually,” Grantaire corrects him. He can see it, a daisy-chain of broken-hearted damsels and the odd distressed dude weeping in Jehan’s office and using up all his tissues, and Jehan trying to glare balefully at Courfeyrac, not that Jehan can pull off stern – 

“Éponine thinks he does it on purpose,” Marius says, and then goes wine-red himself. Grantaire’s not sure if it’s the thought of Éponine or the admission that’s responsible. “I’m not supposed to say that, she doesn’t like personal information being shared–”

“I’ve noticed that,” Grantaire says dryly. “You’ve already said it, pretty much, you might as well keep going.”

Marius is seriously suggestible when he’s wasted. “Éponine thinks he’s still in love with him,” he confides, his voice going hushed. “Courfeyrac with Jehan, that is, I don’t know about Jehan.”

“Bullshit,” Grantaire says, startled. “That was – that was what, second year of college? Fifteen years ago? There’s no way – Courfeyrac ended it then, anyway, and it wasn’t serious.” They’d barely dated six months, and everyone in the ABC had held their breath, terrified that Courfeyrac of the sudden passionate interests and extremely brief attention span was going to hurt Jehan, who was as soft and defenceless and infinitely susceptible to damage as a snail set loose without its shell. They’d all been relieved, even Grantaire, who professed to always expect the worst, when it had ended with a whimper, not a bang, and no hurt feelings or any perceptible change in their friendship.

“It’s what Éponine thinks.” Marius shrugs. “I don’t know, I’m not very good at – I never notice that kind of thing.”

“Your _face_ when I showed up with Enjolras this morning!” Grantaire laughs in agreement without any mirth. “Like – how was that a shock? I always thought I was pretty obvious back then, even if I’m not – no, I’m pretty sure I was obvious now. I’m always _obvious_ about Enjolras.” 

“Oh, everyone knew that,” Marius assures him, in that helpful way he has which isn't actually very helpful at all. “All through college – but I didn’t know about Enjolras, I mean, I guess there was nothing to know back then, but – he doesn’t go home with anyone.”

“There was something to know back then,” Grantaire tells him, because fuck Enjolras, right now. “He just didn’t want anyone to know. Dirty little secret.”

Marius manages to look shocked and upset for Grantaire at the same time. His eyes are a tragic periwinkle and round as an owl's, and seriously, the man is thirty-four, how does he still look so young?

“Anyway,” Grantaire says, because the whole point of this little adventure is to drink away his sorrows without having to dwell on them. Marius’s pain is much more interesting than his own: it has the advantage of being new and interesting, and not Grantaire’s, which means he can sadistically enjoy it. “New York. You and Cosette falling slowly and-not-at-all predictably into pieces.”

“It happened fast,” Marius says, taking the hook. “Things were – less easy, I guess, than they were when we were living here, but then Jean got married, and they just fell apart.”

Grantaire cackles with surprise. “Papa Valjean got _hitched_?” Taking Marius with him as a distraction on his quest for oblivion was a brilliant, brilliant idea. “And Cosette didn’t like it – well, of course she wouldn’t, a new stepmother at her age, when she’s been the apple of his eye all her life – ha ha ha, sorry, I’m not laughing at you, but man, daddy issues, did I call it or what?”

“She didn’t,” Marius says, “but I don’t think – she wasn’t jealous, exactly, she was hurt. She was upset with Jean, and things weren’t quite right between us, and then about a month later they had a blistering fight. She came home and told me – she asked me about all kind of things that happened back around junior year – your senior year, the protests and everything, all that mess afterwards – and – well, I don’t want to go into it, but we had a fight, too, and a week after that, she decided to take the survey in Malaysia.”

Grantaire is more than okay with not talking about his senior year.

“I came home after that,” Marius says, and his voice has gone small and lost. “The lease on our apartment was almost up, and Courfeyrac offered me a place at the firm back here, and Jean didn’t need me anymore, either. And now she’s _here_ , and I – and _Éponine_ – everything’s a mess.”

“There, there,” Grantaire says, and pats his head when Marius lays it despairingly on the table. He has nice hair; a boring brown, nothing like Enjolras's fine corn-silk glory, which is wasted on him, but thick and wavy. Poor Bossuet will have no company in baldness from any of the ABC for many years.

-

Courfeyrac finds them there hours later, several bottles further down, after the bar has filled up with other businessmen and women who've finished with work for the day. He may have called Marius for the location; Grantaire can't remember. They've bonded by the time Courfeyrac arrives, anyway.

“Never really liked you,” Grantaire is confiding blurrily. Marius looks heartbroken. “No, no, it's okay. You're still one of them, y'know. Didn't like you, but I still _love_ you.”

“One of us,” Marius agrees, and lifts his glass in what's probably meant to be a toast. It barely gets two inches clear of the table, and wobbles precariously. “Love you too. Love – love,” he says, and both glass and head end up back on the table. “I love Cosette,” he mutters wretchedly into the wooden surface. 

“I hate Enjolras,” Grantaire tells the empty, betraying, bottle. The latest bottle in a long series to let him down, to promise joy and ecstasy and oblivion and then leave him bereft. He means roughly the same thing Marius does.

“How the fuck are you this bottled at half-past six in the evening?” Courfeyrac asks, appearing behind them. Grantaire nearly tips off his chair, but Marius doesn't even look up.

Courfeyrac's wearing a navy suit and a blue silk tie and he looks all respectable, and a little tired. The way he's looking at them makes Grantaire feel like a teenager being picked up from a party by his father, and then Courfeyrac starts _acting_ like their father, refusing Grantaire's offer of wine and paying their tab with Grantaire's card when Grantaire can't quite manage it, and then pouring them into a cab.

The cab stops somewhere Grantaire's never been before, which turns out to be Courfeyrac's building, where Marius is staying more-or-less indefinitely. Inside it reminds Grantaire a lot of Courfeyrac's office: all glass and show, sleek minimalist furniture and huge TV and a tangle of gaming consoles. Courfeyrac offers him the couch and a bucket, and grumbles about the state of Grantaire's borrowed finery. 

“I'm going to have to burn this jacket – you're going to need to borrow a t-shirt, aren't you? Fuck. I should put a towel down–”

“Stop being such a _dad_ ,” Grantaire tells him, and Marius giggles drunkenly from the floor. “This is all familiar, but all wrong.”

“In college it was always me putting you and Courf to bed,” Marius says helpfully, and hiccups. “I was good then– I was a good boy–”

Courfeyrac makes an exasperated noise, turning his attention to Marius. He's finished making up the couch, and did Grantaire call him a dad? He's totally a mom. 

“You're so, so lucky that we had bigger things at the office to worry about today, and Enjolras is distracted, and Combeferre is being _understanding_ ,” he tells Marius, taking him by the armpits and lifting him into something approaching standing. “This is a one-time-only, wife-showing-up, get-out-of-jail-free pass on bailing on work to go slumming with Grantaire, of all people.”

“Hurtful.” 

“No offence,” Courfeyrac adds, efficiently stripping Marius of his coat, “but you're not exactly the best influence, R. Getting shitfaced is not how Marius should be dealing with his problems.” 

“Ha, ha,” Grantaire says, rolling back onto the couch. “It was good for him, getting out of that fucking office, away from– How should he be dealing with them? More like you? Look at – all of this,” he says, gesturing expansively around Courfeyrac's shiny, flashy, _empty_ apartment. “You're all work and no play, all of you, you and Combeferre and fucking, fucking Enjolras – all you do is work, but it’s all surface. This place, your life– All of you. Everyone says it's so nice to see me, but no one's even _mentioned_ the protests, or the fucking _incident_ – You all act like you're so close, but no one ever says what they're thinking or feeling–” 

“How lucky we have you around again to tell us,” Courfeyrac says. He's got Marius out of coat and jacket and shirt now, down to his undershirt. It cuts like a knife through some of Grantaire's drunken self-pity and self-justification, and he knows that that's his cue to shut up before he says something truly unforgiveable.

Get him drunk and he can rant forever. Shutting up is harder. He should apologise. 

He thinks that, watching Courfeyrac get Marius a glass of water and forcing him to drink it, but he doesn't quite manage it, until Courfeyrac has steered Marius to his bedroom and come back. 

It's just all wrong; in college it was Courfeyrac who got raucous or melancholic with Grantaire over a bottle of wine, and it was Courfeyrac and Grantaire who would reel back to Courfeyrac's digs while Marius, sober, hard-studying Marius, who pretended not to notice women existed until he met Cosette, would help them to bed and clean up after and around them. Courfeyrac is all grown up, and he's left Grantaire behind. 

“Sorry,” he says quietly, when Courfeyrac turns off the living room lights.

-

Courfeyrac didn't answer him the night before, but when Grantaire wakes up, screwing his eyes against his hangover, there's a glass of water by the couch, and a couple of aspirin. Thank fuck he didn't need to use the bucket. 

The living room is much too bright, julienned with ribbons of yellow sunshine cutting through the blinds; it must be eleven, at least. Marius and Courfeyrac are long, long gone. 

Grantaire doesn't envy Marius his early start, if his head is anywhere near as bad. The kitchen is full of dirty pots and pans hinting at the remains of a greasy hangover cure, so Grantaire decides to oblige by washing up, folding up the blankets on the couch, and letting himself out. 

-

His own hotel room seems tinier and grimier and more miserable, compared to the space and shining surfaces of Courfeyrac's apartment. Grantaire hasn't been back for two nights – since he left for an early-morning meeting with Enjolras and found himself involved in an art gallery heist – and at first it doesn't seem like anyone's been in the room at all, even housekeeping. His meagre belongings are still strewn all over the floor, the ashtray by his bed is still full of butts and silty ash.

The bed's been made. The coverlet has been pulled neat and straight, and in the middle of it, like a chocolate on his pillow, someone's left him a present. It's even decorated with a bright red ribbon. Grantaire can feel panic rising in his throat like last night's avoided vomit, and he fumbles blindly for his phone. 

Its roll of contacts can still be counted on one hand, and the process of elimination thins them out further – can't call Enjolras; can't call Courfeyrac, after last night; can't call Éponine, since he vaguely remembers advising Marius to break the fuck up with her. Grantaire's pretty sure he meant it for her own good at the time, for Marius', rather than from a selfish urge to spread his misery around further, but he feels like shit about it now. 

“Grantaire,” Combeferre says, picking up on the second ring. He's there shortly after, without any sign of being out or breath. Grantaire is still standing two steps deep into the room, where he was when he called, unable to move any further forward. 

Combeferre is equally ruthless and efficient in dealing with the parcel. He brushes past Grantaire and picks up the baggie without hesitation; it's a double-barrelled attack, pills and powder together. The little bottles of vodka that Grantaire knows he left untouched in the minibar have been lined up on the nightstand with a flourish, two by two. If he'd come back here last night when he was supposed to, instead of taking Marius out to get him trashed and pull information – 

Combeferre vanishes into the bathroom. Grantaire stares at the triumphant curl of red ribbon, stark against the white bedspread like a long licking tongue against pale flesh, and counts under his breath until the flush.  
Combeferre comes out, empty-handed. 

“The baggie,” Grantaire says. “Is it– The trash–” 

“The baggie,” Combeferre repeats blankly, and then his face alters. “Ah.” He disappears back into the bathroom, returns. “It's in my pocket now, and it's leaving with me, shortly to join its former contents in the sewers via the first drain I see.” 

Grantaire relaxes, minutely. It's not like there'd be enough residue to lick off the plastic to get him a tiny fraction towards high, but he's been that desperate before, and one slip, one crack – “Thank you,” he says, and clears his throat. “For coming over so fast. I know it's working hours, so I – Thank you.” 

“It's not a problem,” Combeferre says, as scrupulously polite as he's been around him since Grantaire came back, and looks at the little bottles. “Do you need me to–” 

“Leave them,” Grantaire says, waving it off. “I need one vice. You can see – I need a fucking drink, after that. Hell of a shock, right? Éponine told me to change hotels, but I wasn't expecting – I mean, fuck.” 

Combeferre looks like he wants to say something, but he doesn't; he pinches the bridge of his nose, instead, where his glasses used to sit. It must be a vestige of habit, leftover and left behind once he upgraded to Lasik or lenses, Grantaire's not sure which. He takes a deliberate seat on the edge of Grantaire's bed, and the cheap bedclothes look weird against the cashmere of his camel-coloured coat, the thin mattress sagging under his weight. 

“Combeferre,” Grantaire starts, and stops in fascination at Combeferre picks up one of the tiny vodka bottles, comically small in his large capable hand. Combeferre unscrews the lid and takes a sip, and Grantaire frankly _gapes_ at him. “What? What are you–” 

“I needed one,” Combeferre says mildly. “ _One_.”

“One,” Grantaire echoes. It's not anything like enough, but he can do that. He takes the open bottle from Combeferre obediently, and its brethren join the baggie in the vanishing pockets of Combeferre's coat. 

When he's knocked it back and wiped his mouth, Combeferre is still watching him. 

“I'm okay now,” Grantaire says, and it's almost entirely true. “I should let you get back to work, right? Thank you, seriously.” 

“It’s not a problem. I’m very glad you called me.” 

“A bit beyond your job description, this kind of call out–” 

“It's not beyond the description of friendship,” Combeferre says, and the little flare of warmth in Grantaire's belly, lit by the vodka, gets larger. “Do I need – is there anything else I should take care of?” 

It's a careful question, watching and wary and deliberately non-threatening. Grantaire wonders what that tactful lacuna covers. Razor blades? 

“No,” he says. “I'm okay. Truly.” 

“Then we'll start packing up your things,” Combeferre says, getting to his feet. “Éponine was right – you can't stay here any longer, not now that they've located you, and certainly not now they've had access to your room. You can stay with me tonight.” 

Grantaire protests, obviously; he doesn’t want to impose, doesn’t want to be scooped back into the warm and oppressive bosom of the erstwhile ABC, doesn’t want to cause any more trouble than he has already. He’s beginning to feel like his return was a mistake, a rock dropped into a quiet millpond. 

“I’ll be grateful for the company,” Combeferre says, cutting all protestations short, and Grantaire feels even more like shit for lashing out last night, though Combeferre wasn’t there to hear it, and he doubts Courfeyrac filled him in. “Even if it’s just tonight. We can always find you a safe location tomorrow, if you really must have a hotel.” 

They pack up his pitifully few belongings – Grantaire hadn’t taken much with him when he abandoned his apartment and studio – and Combeferre checks him out, drives them home, and sets him up in his neat spare room. 

He does seem genuinely glad for the company that night. His living room, as Grantaire suspected, echoes terribly without the ABC crowding it; he works on his laptop, looking up to smile quietly when Grantaire comments on what he’s watching on TV. 

“Sorry for getting you into shit with Enjolras,” Grantaire says, when he can’t bear it anymore, and gets another polite smile. 

“I’m quite used to working with Enjolras,” Combeferre says. “It’s not a problem.” He takes a sip of tea. “I could probably have done without you accusing him of corporate prostitution, but–”

“That was reciprocal, and _deserved._ ” Grantaire pauses. “How the fuck did that even happen? I never imagined Enjolras of all people ending up in private practice, did you put thumbscrews on him or wh-” 

“Enjolras can tell you why he left legal aid himself, if he chooses. You should ask him, someday.” Grantaire needs to make friends who share information without having to get them drunk; Marius is right, though, it’s hard. 

“Mm,” he says neutrally. He’s not sure if he’ll get the opportunity. 

“Marius really does need to brief you properly,” Combeferre says, like he’s read Grantaire’s mind. “Pay him a visit tomorrow morning, and let him fill you in.” 

\- 

In the morning Grantaire has the place to himself, as he had Courfeyrac’s the morning before.

He’d barely skimmed the photos on display in Courfeyrac’s living room: most of them had been impersonal, anyway, glossy shots of Courfeyrac graduating, shaking hands with unfamiliar people who were probably important, laughing in the middle of parties full of strangers with pretty women on his arm. There’d only been a few shots of the ABC: a snapshot of Marius studying in their college dorm while Courfeyrac sat cross-legged on the floor, doing something to a pile of flyers; a group shot from the Musain; Courfeyrac standing at Enjolras’s left and Combeferre on his right, shoulder to shoulder, at the opening of _EC &C_. One very old and curling photo of Jehan, looking about nineteen and bashful, lying in the grass with his eyes shut against the sunlight, but that hadn't been framed and put on display, just half-hidden behind another frame. 

Going through Combeferre's things would feel like sacrilege, even just grazing the surfaces for clues, so Grantaire doesn't. It takes a lot of self-control, but that's something he's been working on. He hadn't lied to Enjolras when he said he'd been clean eighteen months; it's not his first attempt, but it's stuck the longest. It's also almost entirely the reason he walked into _EC &C_ in the first place; he's not sure he would have ever tried to make sense of his deal with Patron-Minette if he'd still been using. Certainly, he wouldn't have cared. 

It rankles that Enjolras didn't let him explain; assumed the worst straight away. Grantaire hasn't fucked with the really hard stuff since he crawled out of the pit in Dothan he'd spent five years in. His more recent vices are – were – prescription, mostly, strictly on the borderline of hipster-acceptable in the art circles he ran in. That's not something he _can_ explain to Enjolras, to whom all addictions are one. Grantaire is self-aware enough to recognise himself as a human black hole which will always need to be filled up with something, and the only thing he has any control over is what that something is. 

-

Grantaire stops at the bakery again on the way into see Marius, and this time it's purely a selfish gesture, something to make up for lashing out in his own misery and loneliness at everyone else's. He can barely manage the doors of the lobby or the buttons on the elevator, but he makes it into _EC &C_ anyway. 

“I wasn't aware we had changed catering contractors,” Combeferre says, when Grantaire breaks into his office to hand out extra-dry cappuccinos and pastries; his big brown paper bag has gone almost translucent with butter. 

“We can't afford catering contractors,” Courfeyrac corrects him, breaking off a piece of cinnamon brioche and popping in into his mouth. The look he gives Grantaire isn't unfriendly, but there's a faint edge to it. “Hope you're cheap.” 

“The _cheapest_ ,” Grantaire agrees fervently, and gets a real smile. 

He doesn't bother taking anything to Enjolras or Éponine; after snagging provisions for Marius, he leaves the extras with Courfeyrac and Combeferre, and trusts that they'll see them into the right hands. 

Marius is disgustingly bright-eyed and disgustingly grateful. His boyish good looks have bounced back from misery and debauchery without mark or mar. “Thank you! That's so kind of you!” 

“Shh, I forgot to get food for the little people,” Grantaire hushes him, with a beady glance over the partition at the eavesdropping secretaries and paralegals. “Why did you call me in? And why are you so happy? It's offensive.” 

Marius laughs, like he thinks Grantaire is kidding. “I've had some good news,” he says. “Also, some – well, not bad news, but – I wanted to thank you for the other night.” 

“Courfeyrac should have got you wasted a long time ago,” Grantaire says. “He's been falling down on the job.” 

“Not for that,” Marius protests, colouring. “For your advice.” 

“I'm a sage dispenser of wisdom,” Grantaire agrees uneasily; he said a lot of things, he's pretty sure, and he's also sure that almost none of them were good advice. “I could stand some good news, lay it on me.” 

“I had dinner with Cosette last night!” Marius says, which is not the kind of good news Grantaire wanted, but given Marius's _everything_ , it's about what he expected. “We talked, and – well, we're not, I mean, it's not fixed, but it's better, a little.” 

“Fantastic,” Grantaire says. He's actually careful not to sound too sarcastic; he doesn't want to squash Marius flat, and it would be so easy to do. He's actually _trying_ not to alienate the people trying to help him, even though lashing out is still his first instinct, like an injured animal. 

“I mean, that's me,” Marius says. “I have some good news on your front, too – I've been in touch with some of the people I used to work with, with my father-in-law – with Jean, about your case, and he had some interesting – well, I'll let Enjolras tell you.” 

“Enjolras dumped this case on you, didn't he? Don't tell me he's changed his admirably fixed mind,” Grantaire says, and okay, a _little_ sarcasm leeches into his voice, but it's Marius; the chances of him picking up on it are low. “Did Combeferre scold him back into being a good boy? Did my delicious pastries melt his stony heart?” 

“Actually, he received a call from the DA's office in New York,” Enjolras says from behind him, dispassionate, and Grantaire does not fall out of his chair, although he comes close. 

Marius, the traitor, looks equally shocked, although he had a clear view of Enjolras approaching on silent feline feet, and could have, _should have_ given Grantaire some warning.

Enjolras gives him a nod, though, and it's an approving one, a captain looking down his ranks to single out one of his men for praise. “Marius's initiative has yielded interesting results – Patron-Minette's operations aren't limited to this city. We have a better idea of what's going on, and how far the rot has spread.” 

“So what does this DA have to do with anything?” Grantaire asks, trying to sound unaffected. “Does he want to help?” 

Enjolras's attention switches to him like a spotlight. It's one of his cool, microscoping looks, distant and assessing. _Are you going to be a worthwhile client?_ it asks. _Is this case worth my time and effort? Will you botch it somehow? Can I trust you?_ “The opposite, in fact. He wants us to drop the case.” 

For a moment, all Grantaire feels is absolute betrayal; no wonder Enjolras looked so pleased with Marius, how happy he must be to have a good excuse to dump Grantaire off the _EC &C_ books, to wash his hands completely of him – 

He is so very lucky that shock leaves his forked tongue thick and useless in his mouth, that only Marius catches the look on his face, because Enjolras sweeps on, expression settling into stern lines.

“I told him to fuck himself, obviously,” he says, like it _is_ obvious, and suddenly Grantaire gets it, gets that such a demand could only act on Enjolras like a red flag to a bull; Enjolras with his problems with authority and his long-standing distrust of institutions, Enjolras who had gone into public defence out of law school the way he'd always said he would, to offer the poor and wretched their right to decent, talented, _motivated_ counsel, who with all his bright aspirations had still come curving back to earth like a meteorite. 

Enjolras, who barely falters before correcting his words into something more professional. “That is, we informed his office that our duty to our client made such a course of action impossible–” 

Marius stops fiddling with his pen to give Grantaire a silent thumbs-up under the table, and he's glowing under his freckles with the force of something Grantaire doesn't understand yet. Enjolras is talking, but for once Grantaire's not wholly fixated on him. Marius opens his hand and there's something written on it: _Cosette wants to talk to you._


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NB: mentions of a past suicide attempt.

They adjourn from Marius's inglorious cubicle to the privacy of Enjolras's office. Grantaire could seriously get whiplash from all the shuffling back and forth, but Marius doesn't seem chagrined to have the reins jerked from his hands and gathered firmly back into Enjolras's control. Enjolras is a control freak, Grantaire's decided. One whisper of outside interest from New York, and his dominance is formidably reasserted. 

“I'm going to need to brief you in full, since you've yet to be brought up to date on the background,” Enjolras says, and glances at Marius like the delay is his fault.

Which it is, to a certain extent, since Marius had let Grantaire persuade him to ditch it and go out and get smashed at Corinthe, but it was Enjolras who had handed it off in the first place, and Enjolras who had decided that Grantaire should be kept less than informed until Patron-Minette were all but knocking at the door, the same way he decided that Grantaire didn't need what was going down at the gallery until literally the last possible minute. Grantaire can't even be properly angry about that; Enjolras learned not to trust him with crucial information and tasks in advance of action thirteen years ago, and if the lesson stuck –

Marius has beautiful manners, something which would get more play if he had more emotional awareness of when best to employ them, so he doesn't say anything to defend himself; just nods dutifully.

“Alright, I'm braced,” Grantaire says, leaning back in his seat and linking his hands behind his head. He hadn't expected anything more formal than Marius and his cubicle, so he hadn't bothered with the blazer; the sideways look he gets from Enjolras skins him from booted feet to ratty jeans to printed t-shirt and looped scarf, and finds him wanting. “I'm a big boy. I'm prepared. I can take it.”

He gets a huff of amused breath from Marius. No rise out of Enjolras. 

“As I began to tell you, before we were interrupted on Tuesday–” Another accusing glance at Marius, like that was his fault as well – “Patron-Minette's interest in keeping you bound to them has less to do with your merit as an artist, and more to do with the cover that you, and their other artist assets, lend to their less savoury operations.”

Grantaire nods his understanding. As he told Éponine when she came to drag him along to that first dinner party, he has an _inkling_ of their street-level game, even if the flashy stuff is beyond him. He knows that property mangagement, investment capital, and art patronage are just the cream of Patron-Minette's various ventures, and because he knows Montparnasse, he has an idea of what some of the less respectable lines of business might be.

“There's not much in this city that they're not linked to, in some way or another – but it's their illegitimate practices we're concerned with right now. What do you know about money laundering?”

Grantaire shrugs. “Fuck all.”

“ Éponine could explain this better, if she was here,” Enjolras says, with another slightly frustrated frown. “She's particularly talented at tracing money. I'm not sure if I – well, in essence, money is a big logistical problem for organisations like Patron-Minette. Forty pounds of cocaine translates into one million in cash, which in turn weighs about two hundred and fifty pounds. Just the volume in cash is a problem, and spending it without drawing attention is a worse one.

“This is where the money laundering comes in. It takes three stages; the cash has to enter a bank, through various means, without drawing attention. That's the placement. Then comes the layering; it's transferred around a few times, to muddy the trail, and often changes form, used to purchase things like real estate. Then, once it's been liquidated again, it has to enter the mainstream economy disguised as legitimate income, as clean cash. That's the final stage, integration.

“Patron-Minette have a number of shell companies and business channels available to them for cleaning their dirty money, but we estimate that about ten to fifteen percent of their illegitimate income passes through the galleries and auction houses they administer in their guise as patrons of the arts.” Enjolras stops to draw breath, and to smile sardonically. “I'm sure the community goodwill and respect they get from that has something to do with it, too. This particular angle of their operations seems to be your friend Montparnasse's contribution to the business, around the time they started acting as agents for a circle of legitimate – and prolific – artists. You were one of the very first, if not the first.”

“ _Not_ my friend,” Grantaire says tightly. He feels sick about having maybe given Montparnasse the idea, inadvertent or not. 

“Mm,” Enjolras says, just as tight, and Marius's eyes swivel back and forth between them like someone watching tennis. “In any case, that's where a lot of the backing capital for their art dealing comes from. They're not really setting out to make a profit from it. They filter the dirty money through the auctions and gallery sales; the prices for the works they sell are inflated through high bidding, and bought by third party buyers, who use the dirty money initially funnelled to them _from_ Patron-Minette. A large percentage of the dirty money therefore goes straight back to Patron-Minette as their legitimate income, as agents and middlemen – and a cut of it goes to the artists who produce the work. It works quite well; anyone who questions the high monetary value of the artwork is simply reminded that artistic merit is something difficult to qualitatively ascertain.”

It takes more than a moment for Grantaire to assimilate the sudden dump of data; to recover from the blow. 

“Well,” he says finally, with all the bravado he can muster. “That explains a lot. I knew it had to be too good to be true, all these people willing to spend so much money on my stuff.”

Marius looks stricken, the way he did when Grantaire was drunkenly blurting out his secret sexual history with Enjolras. Enjolras looks suddenly blank, like he hadn't worked out the exact emotional ramifications of what he was saying. 

“Patron-Minette's planted buyers weren't the only purchasers,” he says. “I mean, obviously part of the point of the operation was to bury the illegitimate transactions among genuine ones. And the ones they did buy – they don't seem to have cached the work, they seem to have resold a lot of auctioned art through the galleries or to legitimate private owners–”

“Ah, well, Apollo,” Grantaire says, and gives him his most brillant and carefree smile. “Don't you remember the briefing I gave _you_ about the people who buy art? Most of them will buy anything if you show it somewhere flashy, slap a big price tag on it and tell them it's trending.”

Marius makes a little noise of protest, but Enjolras drops his eyes to the folio of documents on his desk, abandoning his awkward attempt at comfort or whatever that was for professionalism again.

It's a lot to take in. Grantaire's not sure he's really processed it all yet. He'd known something was up, off, that _something_ was badly wrong, but the flat statements delivered in Enjolras's most detached lawyerly tones, explaining the way his entire adult career, the last eight years of his life, have been nothing more than a bit of persiflage for drug money –

“New York,” Grantaire prompts, when the silence becomes oppressive. “DA?”

“Asshole,” Enjolras says, but it's directed at the distant DA, not Grantaire. He sits up a little straighter in his chair. “That's – we're still working out all the details. _How_ he got wind of the fact that we were considering court action against Patron-Minette, I'm still not certain, but it seems to clash with something of his own. I'm not sure if there's a case being made against them there he doesn't want us to interfere with, or whether he's in their pocket and trying to – I don't know.”

“But you'll let me know when you do,” Grantaire says. It's not quite a command. 

“Of course.”

“Good.”

“Um,” Marius says. “Are we–? Should I–? Is that all?”

“For now,” Enjolras says, blinking. “Send Louison to me, I need her notes on the health insurance case.” Marius disappears, and Grantaire stretches in his seat, cracks his neck.

“All for me, too?”

“Yes, for now.” Enjolras looks the papers in front of him, fingers tapping against the edge of his desk, lovely profile half-averted. Grantaire waits – for an apology, a dismissal, _something._ They can't just pick up where they left off and not discuss the whole thing where they had a screaming fight in the _EC &C_ lobby, or the thing where they burgled an art gallery, or the thing where they went back to Enjolras's high on success and – 

“I'm going to be very busy this week and next, but I'll keep in contact. Let me know if there are any developments I should be aware of, and I'll return the courtesy. Thank you for coming in, M. Grantaire.”

“You're welcome, M. Enjolras,” Grantaire says with all the ironic formality he can muster, and waits until he's in the elevator before he drops the detached, blasé mask he assumed somewhere in the middle of Enjolras's exposition on money-laundering.

Okay, then.

Enjolras seems to have decided to ignore everything. He's stepped back in as his lawyer, and nothing else. The icy professionalism is back.

The few scattered meetings he snatches with Enjolras in the next week only confirm Grantaire's reading of the situation. Enjolras is formal and careful, forbearing to snap or scold. Even the little flicker of personality he betrayed in the jab at Montparnasse is stamped out; he treats Grantaire like any of his clients, like he never kissed Grantaire so blindly in this very office that he sent stacks and stacks of files tumbling to the floor, like Grantaire never went to his knees for him in the small quiet privacy of his bedroom. 

It's _working,_ which is the truly terrible thing. Marius sits in on most meetings, but his chaperonage isn't really necessary; Grantaire matches Enjolras courtesy for courtesy, stiffness for stiffness, and keeps his own conversation scrupulously clean of innuendo or cajolery or any of his usual verbal flourishes. They're actually functioning again, hammering out a professional relationship built on ignoring the unfinished business, the messy personal feelings and hurts and betrayals. 

He does catch Enjolras looking at him once or twice in the spaces where Grantaire would usually smirk or joke, waiting for something. The silence seems to draw him up short every time, like he doesn't even know what to do with Grantaire when he's actually keeping to the rules, like he's a little lost without the pushback Grantaire has always provided, even though he always ignored it anyway. 

Grantaire's not going to push. There's a limit to the number of chances Enjolras will give him, and he must be on his very last. 

Enjolras doesn't really do second chances. Once someone has shown their worth, once he's taken their measure – that's it. He doesn't change his mind. That Grantaire got a second chance after conclusively failing his test has to be due to the decade-plus between last failure and new introduction, and a lot of bullying on Combeferre's part. He doesn't think failing to tell Enjolras every little bit of his past is enough to screw up that second chance entirely – in fact, he's pretty sure it's Enjolras who should be apologising for that scene in the _EC &C_ lobby, his fingertips hard points against the skin inside Grantaire's elbow – but it might have been, if the DA in New York hadn't pissed Enjolras off again. Grantaire might have been permanently farmed off on Marius, and that would have been it.

He may not _like_ the fact that Enjolras has retreated behind his glass wall again, but this fragile entente is a better option than smashing heedlessly through Enjolras's distance and grabbing wildly for him, fuck the consequences; it's better than what happened when he threw his first chance away.

After Enjolras was finally released after the protests, Grantaire had been ready to beg – to promise _anything,_ to sit at his feet like a dog, if that was necessary for forgiveness. He hadn't gotten it; Enjolras had looked through him like he was a ghost for the rest of the year. Grantaire doesn't think he'd ever acknowledged his existence again, until he'd turned up in his office thirteen years later, rummaging through his desk and generally making a mess out of neatness and order. If he has to choose, and apparently he does, he'll take this over the possibility of _nothing_.

-

“So I figured out what the pastry was for,” Éponine says, cornering him. She has to stop doing that. Grantaire's willing to bet that she's never been to this particular bookstore before in her life, let alone had any reason to suppose he'd be there, and yet, here she is. She may have chipped his phone, not his person, but it works out to about the same thing. 

He gives her his best look of confusion. “I'm sorry, what?”

“I get paid to make connections, R. It wasn't difficult to figure out who Marius had been talking to before he came to me and said, very seriously, that he thought it would be a good idea if we stopped whatever we'd been doing. That's what I get – not the dignity of a relationship, but 'whatever we've been doing.'”

Éponine deserves better than bullshit, Grantaire knows, so he drops the pretense. “Look – okay, I talked to him. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to take the decision out of your hands, just – I'm sorry.”

“You should be.” They're quiet for a moment. He sneaks a look at her under his eyelashes and finds her staring at a shelf of fantasy novels, dark eyes half-lidded in thought and mouth a straight line. She doesn't look anything like as furious as he expected she'd be. “You don't deserve it, but I'm grateful to you. I knew it wasn't going anywhere and that it needed to end. I knew I needed to kill it, I just – couldn't.” 

“Pontmercy's that good in the sack?” Grantaire says, to give her a moment to pull herself together. Éponine doesn't do raw emotion comfortably. 

That gets a half-laugh. “Do you really want to know?”

“I like to know things,” Grantaire says, “but that – no.”

“He is, actually,” Éponine says thoughtfully, adding “No, really,” when he scoffs. “He's – sweet. Generous.”

“I'm actually going to puke, Éponine, are you happy? I'm even sober. This is disgusting and unfair.”

“And deserved,” she says, and okay, maybe he deserves a little payback, but this is something the Geneva Convention would consider cruel and inhuman. “Sober? How did that happen?”

“I'm still staying with Combeferre. No helpful little minibar constantly restocked by magic. It's a dry house. He doesn't even keep cooking sherry or Listerine on the premises, not that I'd lower myself, but still– He told you about the little present Patron-Minette left for me?”

“He did,” Éponine says. “I'm not going to say that I told you so–”

“But you did,” Grantaire agrees. “Is that – was that the first little gift they've left for me?”

“No. It was a little cruder than their earlier attempts, though. They seem to have been trying to woo you back into line before, but that was more–”

“Personal,” Grantaire finishes. He knows exactly whose brainchild that little gift had been; Montparnasse does know him better than he should, and he would have been only too well aware of how easy it would be for Grantaire to slip. Fuck, he'd _shoved_ him, he and Claquesous at that meeting, deliberately blown up Grantaire's problems in front of people Montparnasse knows _mattered_ to him, and then expected him to go home full of self-loathing and find oblivion tied up a bright red ribbon. It was cruel, and it was personal, and Montparnasse can't even have known how things had started to work between Grantaire and Enjolras, that the damage would be greater than even he had expected. He'd had Claquesous push him off a cliff and hoped he'd reach out for something damaging on his way down. 

“This isn't a great place to talk,” Éponine says, glancing around the shelves like the professional paranoid she is, and Grantaire's more than happy to let her steer him somewhere else; it's Éponine, he fully expects to end up in another bar Jaegerbombing the pain away together.

She cruelly betrays him, though, and they end up in a tiny Starbucks that's all but a glorified hallway, with barely six tables. “ _Et tu_?” Grantaire asks plaintively, then perks up when he realises the leverage this gives him. “Couldn't you – isn't it, like, against the _EC &C_ code of conduct to be seen dead in one of these holes? Won't Enjolras turn you out on the spot?”

“Starbucks actually has very good employee healthcare and has expressed strong support for gay rights and same-sex marriage,” Éponine says calmly over her macchiato, but Grantaire can't imagine that that cuts much ice with Enjolras. “Moreover, it's a corporate giant Patron-Minette have absolutely no foothold in, and if they tried, Starbucks would _crush_ them.”

“You keep talking, but all I hear is 'no special coffee',” Grantaire says. “Look, we could talk about them, and believe me, at some point, I want to; I want to know everything you know, because I seriously doubt that Enjolras has told me everything even yet, and I want to know why the fuck Enjolras has persisted in not telling me shit up to now, but I'd rather talk about you, because I do feel – I am sorry, Éponine.”

“The staggering hypocrisy of his need-to-know policy has been pointed out to him,” she says, and okay, maybe Grantaire should have stuck around to hear the conversations that took place back at EC&C instead of taking Marius off to get drunk after all. “And I'm fine.”

“No, you're not.”

“I'm okay,” Éponine corrects herself, and gives Grantaire a look that says he'd better not contradict _that._ “It needed to happen. It wasn't healthy. I wish I'd been the one to do it, that's all.” Grantaire pats her hand awkwardly, and she slants a smile at him. “And, of course, I'll miss the sex.”

“Oh, _fuck_ you.”

She chuckles low in her throat, and even if it's at his expense it pleases him. “I wasn't just saying how good it was to torture you, you know. It's not something to take for granted, kindness and generosity in bed, but that's not why I couldn't end it.”

Grantaire has never wanted generosity when it comes to sex. He hasn't been given it often, either.

Éponine stirs her coffee, recrosses her legs. Her knee-high boots are shiny and beautiful, but heavy-soled enough to do damage. “I still don't understand – how could I finally get what I wanted, and then not want it? All those _years._ ”

“Look who you're talking to,” Grantaire says, and regrets it when Éponine stops looking inward and looks sharply at him instead. “If anyone knows what that's like, I do.”

“So you're over him? It didn't look like that in the rearview mirror on Heist Night.”

“We don't speak of that,” Grantaire says. “Or at least, we won't. Anyway, we're not talking about me. We're talking about you. It's okay to be over Pontmercy, you know. That doesn't mean it was any less real back then, or that it didn't hurt. Doesn't hurt.”

Another piercing look. “Do you remember what you told me that night, when you found me walking around in the rain?”

Grantaire doesn't. It was a bad time for him; he'd started to be more interested in drinking than in painting, and he was falling behind on his work. He'd been fooling around with Enjolras for a few months, in the tiny spaces and fractions of time Enjolras was able to find for it, holding back desperately; Enjolras had wanted something from him, but what he wanted had been a bucket compared to the ocean of what Grantaire had been willing to pour out. It had fucked him up, having but not having, touching but not touching, and everything had felt desperate in the way things did when you were young –

Lamarque had just been fired, and the first of the protests was being planned, and Grantaire had been able to tell that was a bad, bad, fucking idea; he didn't have any idea just how ugly it was going to get, but he had been able to look at his friends and see them for their passion and intelligence and youth, their potential, and know that they were possibly throwing their futures away forever if they went ahead with their plans. 

It had been a weird, strange time: half the eerie calm before the storm hits, and half building, inexorable pressure. Marius had chosen that time, of all times, to fall in love, hard and passionate and all-consuming after nearly three years of diligent studying and apparent complete ignorance of the female gender. He'd come into the Musain with his heart in his eyes and the most absolutely foolish expression on his face, declaring his engagement after knowing Cosette all of a month, two. Later that night – well, early the next morning – Grantaire had found Éponine wandering around outside the dorms, soaked to the skin, and made her come upstairs and dry off. He doesn't remember it well, though. It's been thirteen years, and even then – especially then – the blank spots had started showing up in his memory. 

“You made me a hot toddy,” Éponine says, and okay, that sounds like him. “My teeth were chattering and my hands were so numb they ached, and you put this terrible old blanket around me and found a mug somewhere and shoved it in my hands. And then we talked until dawn, and you were drawing me the whole time, and you told me that pain was a beautiful thing. You told me, 'If it hurts, that's how you know you're alive'.”

“Éponine,” Grantaire says uselessly. He is going to have to buy her _so many more pastries._ There may not be enough pastries in the city to make up for that particular piece of cynical fatuousness. 

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes.” Grantaire pauses, torn between honesty and making himself appear less pathetic; honesty wins out. “I don't mind it, you know. I prefer the whole forever-unrequited thing to the – to _hoping_ , and to having, but not having enough. It's a good hurt.”

Éponine looks at him like he's lying, but she doesn't call him on it, and Grantaire makes shift to turn the conversation to something lighter; she should think about upgrading from Marius to Bahorel, he tells her; _think how lethal your babies would be_! Éponine scorns this idea – Bahorel apparently has a thing for much older ladies – but it's fun to batt nonsense ideas around, to gossip about things that don't hurt, to pretend to imagine Éponine's children strangling snakes in their cribs like the child Hercules.

-

Children are more fun to think about in the abstract than in the flesh, Grantaire discovers. He and Enjolras might have been giving each other careful, courteous space, but the former and apparently eternal ABC has been breathing down his neck since the disastrous meeting with Claquesous and Montparnasse, since Enjolras decided he was done with Grantaire's fuckery yet again. It's the kind of multi-headed Hydra-like effort than can only have been concerted. Jehan scoops him up and takes him out for tea and a poetry reading, coaxes him into coming along to one of his lectures on French symbolist influence on T. S. Eliot. Éponine continues to keep creepily well-informed tabs on him, popping up at his elbow at random intervals. Courfeyrac appears to have let whatever stupidity Grantaire threw at him go, and keeps turning up at Combeferre's with DVDs and takeout. Joly and Musichetta invite him over for dinner. Grantaire refuses the first time, but can't get out of the second.

“We do rotate hosting our little get-togethers,” Combeferre points out reasonably, “and it's very kind of them to offer to take over this month's. I think they think having a houseguest is stretching my bachelor powers to the limit.”

“I'm sorry–”

“Don't be ridiculous. It's no problem for me at all; they just underestimate my powers.”

“How silly of them,” Grantaire says dryly, and Combeferre's smile is a little bit evil. 

Dinner at Joly and Musichetta's – and Bossuet's, because apparently Bossuet, in addition to being their stay-at-home provider of childcare, also lives in the big house out in the suburbs, so perhaps that's Grantaire's answer to the perennial Bossuet Question – is loud. It's pure Bedlam, and that's even before all of the ABC et affiliées migrate out there from the city. Jehan and Marius are late, and Enjolras's attendence is, apparently as per usual, a question mark.

“This is your Uncle R,” Musichetta tells the little girl clinging to her side, and Grantaire shoots her a look of mingled horror and reproach.

“I'm no one's uncle. Don't saddle me with that – hell, don't saddle the poor _kid_ with that.”

“Accept your fate,” Bossuet tells him cheerfully, tilting his head at the crowded living room over the head of the little boy in his arms. “Everyone here is their uncle. Well, Éponine's an aunt, but it's the same thing.”

“I could be an uncle,” Éponine offers. “I'm not that attached to being Tante Éponine.”

“Stop showing me up,” Grantaire orders, and sinks down on his heels a little until he's at eye level with Isabel, who stares back at him with solemn brown eyes and her finger in her mouth. “Hey, kid.”

“Say 'Uncle R',” Courfeyrac coaches, because he's the worst, and Joly shoots him a look and then proceeds to do worse still.

“Say _Avuncule,_ ” he says, crouching down too. “Or, wait – _Patrue_.”

“Are we teaching the children Latin already?”

“We are _not,_ ” Musichetta says, and Grantaire nods to her, as a sane port in a storm, until she adds, “French and Spanish, first, after English, and we'll worry about Latin and other ancillary languages when they're in their teens.”

“Oh my god, you're _all_ insane,” Grantaire says, and Isabel takes her finger out of her mouth long enough to ask “Qui est fou?”

“I could use a hand with some of these,” Combeferre breaks in, tilting his chin at the groceries in his arm, brown-paper-bagged for the sake of the environment and baby seals up in Greenland, and then in the direction of the far-off kitchen. Éponine leaves off coaxing Isabel to call her _Oncle Éponine_ long enough to spring up and help, and Grantaire shamelessly waylays her long enough to dump his own armful onto her.

“Sit down, take a load off,” Courfeyrac orders, passing him a beer, like this is his own personal fiefdom. Grantaire's not sure whether the fact no eyebrows rise over Courfeyrac's assumption of host duties is due to the ABC holding everything in common, or because he's _Courfeyrac_ – so charming that everyone colludes in letting him get away with murder. He'd done it all the time in college, inviting himself over and farming out party locations to other peoples' places, and no one had ever resented it, the way Grantaire's more obtrusive sponging had sometimes worn thin. 

Grantaire is too cynical to be charmed, but he takes the beer and sits down on the sofa, and only realises a beat too late that there another trap closing, one arranged by silent glances over his head.

“Wh– _L'Aigle!_ ”

“Don't drop him,” Bossuet says, with considerable amusement, watching Grantaire struggle to hold onto his sudden lapful of squirming baby. “They're pretty wriggly at that age, and if you're not careful he'll fling himself onto the floor.” 

“Take it back,” Grantaire pleads. They're all watching him; Bossuet, Joly and Musichetta, Courfeyrac, Bahorel. Isabel has wandered away, back to her colouring. None of them seem to be particularly worried, which is insane, because only a complete lunatic would give _Grantaire a baby._

“Uh!” says the baby in his arms. It sounds enthusiastic. “Uh, uh, uh!”

“Hey,” Grantaire says weakly, and joggles him on his knee. It seems to help. “Okay, very funny, ha ha. Can you please take the kid back now?”

“You seem to have the trick of it,” Joly says, sounding much too unconcerned for someone whose only son and heir is being dandled by an amateur. 

“I'll help you out,” Courfeyrac offers, and Grantaire looks to him as to salvation, but it's only the beer he rescues. “You get to know each other better, I'm going to go help out in the kitchen.” 

“The guests are showing you up,” Musichetta says, glancing to her left and right, and like magic Joly and Bossuet melt off after Courfeyrac. 

“Lady mine,” Grantaire begs, and it's an old, old joke, one Jehan started a million years ago, head full of sophomore passion for Chaucer. He'd lifted the 'muse' from 'Musichetta' and addressed her like that whenever he was feeling courtly: _O lady myn, that called art Clio, thow be my speed fro this forth, and my Muse._ He hasn't thought about that bit of teenage pretension in over a decade.

Grantaire had borrowed the trick from him, because he'd never met a classical reference he wasn't willing to run with until everyone was sick of it. Clio wasn't quite the right fit for literary Musichetta, so he'd tagged her with a bunch of muses' names at random, whichever fit best at the moment – Terpsichore, Calliope, Melpomene. Joly had bristled, and Bossuet had bristled alongside him in solidarity, but they'd been young, and they hadn't quite figured out that Jehan was never going to be a romantic threat, and that Grantaire liked to play and tease and flirt with girls and guys alike, but never, ever meant it, except when it came to Enjolras. They may not have even realised that particular exception until the last year of college; he'd camouflaged it amongst a lot of meaningless flirting as well as he could.

“Joly's right, you're not doing too badly,” Musichetta says, with a critical eye. She sits down next to him, and Bahorel takes the other side of the sofa, and despite the encouragement Grantaire has the strong feeling of being bookended by bodyguards, supervised for his own good – or the kid's. Probably the kid's. “Keep bouncing him, he likes that.”

“Uh!”

Grantaire joggles him again, eliciting more happy hiccups and shrieks. Gabriel stops trying to throw himself backwards, at least, and he seems to be happy treating Grantaire's knee as a rocking horse, one fat little hand clutching his sleeve. 

“There,” Bahorel says. “Uncle R, already a practiced hand. Say 'Uncle R', Gabe. R? R?”

“Uh!”

“That's cheating,” Grantaire says, but he bounces the kid some more. He's solid and compact, surprisingly heavy, and he has Musichetta's curls and a look of wild glee that's wholly original. Grantaire remembers Musichetta showing him photos from the kid's second birthday, so he must be a proper toddler, not really a baby at all. Grantaire can't remember the last time he held a child of any age. 

“Let me tell you about the perks of unclehood,” Bahorel says, like someone pitching a business idea. “You get to buy them hilarious toys – wicked Lego sets you get to put together _for_ them, trumpets or xylophones if Joly's really pissed you off lately – and you take them to the movies you're too old to go see by yourself – well, not Gabe yet, but Belle – and you get to feed them ice cream and sweets and push them on the swings or put them on the carousel, and then – this is the best part – you get to give them _back_.”

“'Uncle' shouldn't mean 'bad influence',” Musichetta sighs, “and yet–”

“See, you really don't want to recruit me into the ranks,” Grantaire says. He tries again to give the baby back, and is foiled again. “I foresee only bad things coming from an excess of uncles. Too much imbalance, the kids'll end up warped. I'm even less likely to be a parent than an uncle, but–”

“Oh, we have Jehan to provide the nurturing feminine touch,” Bahorel assures him, and Musichetta sticks him with her elbow. “Hey! You know it's true, and anyway, you're not in the running, you don't count in this discussion.”

“That was on Jehan's behalf, not mine.”

“As if Jehan would _mind_. He'd take it as a compliment.”

“You need more aunts, not more uncles, that's what I'm saying,” Grantaire says. “Marry them in, if you can't recruit them, and for fuck's sake, don't recruit me.”

“Uh!”

“Don't look at me,” Bahorel says, and Musichetta makes a decidedly indelicate noise.

“Please. You and Courfeyrac, you're players. I wash my hands of you. Enjolras and Combeferre, they're lost causes for completely different reasons, but I have hopes of Feuilly.” 

“What about Jehan?” Bahorel demands. “Why does Jehan get off the hook?”

“Jehan has had some lovely partners,” Musichetta allows, “but that would only add to the uncle excess.”

“Uh!”

“Listen to him,” Bahorel says fondly. “That's right, Gabe. R!”

“There's always Cosette,” Grantaire suggests, throwing her name in to divert from any discussion of his own chances of bringing in new uncles or aunts by marriage. Cosette has been on his mind since Marius told him she wanted to see him; he agreed to set up a meeting, under the influence of Marius's imploring eyes, but he can't imagine what she wants. “Does she still count?”

“Cosette counts in her own right,” Musichetta says firmly. “Married, or separated, or divorced.”

“Who's doing what, marrying or giving in marriage?” Courfeyrac asks, coming back into the room.

“Not you, Musichetta's just been telling me.”

Courfeyrac says “ _God_ , no,” with sincere horror, and laughs. So much for Éponine's theory. 

Grantaire keeps watching, though, after Jehan and Marius arrive. He watches all of them, like they're a show put on for his amusement. Last time he was the newcomer and the focus of attention, pinned under a bright spotlight he couldn't slip. This time he's allowed to blend into the background. Focusing on the baby seems to be great deflection; it gets him fond smiles from the others whenever they glance in his direction, which they still do too frequently for his liking. Joly's the worst and the least subtle, but he's not alone in his constant tab-keeping. 

Watching them back is only fair, and character studies are Grantaire's meat and drink. All people are puzzles, and these people are of particular interest, particular challenges; he knows who they were, but who they are now, and who they've _been, that still needs untangling._

He watches Marius avoiding Éponine, and Éponine avoiding Marius, and the way Éponine still looks at him when she knows he's not looking back. It's not the hungry way she used to watch him as a girl, but it's full of obvious hurt, and she can't seem to stop, like someone constantly poking at a sore tooth. 

He watches Courfeyrac with Jehan, close and covert, and can't detect any hidden shadows, any kind of special treatment beyond the slightly more careful, slightly warmer way everyone is with Jehan. Either Éponine's a delusional romantic – a characterisation Grantaire would dismiss, except for her ridiculous hang-up on Marius Pontmercy, of all people – or Courfeyrac's a superb dissembler, and more subtle by far than Grantaire has ever managed. He can understand the need for subtlety, though. Enjolras, back in college, was blind to everything but his causes; Jehan is uncannily perceptive. 

He watches Jehan, too. Jehan used to be painfully shy as a boy, but as a man he's centered. He's no Courfeyrac – _no one_ is as confident as Courfeyrac – but he's quiet now, rather than timid, thoughtful but no longer so transparent that everything shows on his face as clear as water. It used to _hurt_ , watching Jehan feel things. Grantaire could never have put himself out there that nakedly, with no shields or deflections; he'd always been aware of the very real danger of being crushed to pulp. Watching Jehan look at Courfeyrac in that brief year they'd been a thing had made him sick with selfish envy and unselfish fear at the same time. He doesn't see anything but comfortable friendship in Jehan's expression when he looks at Courfeyrac now.

Beyond Marius and Éponine's flat avoidance of each other – does anyone else notice? Surely it's blatantly obvious, Grantaire can't be the only one seeing it – it's _nice,_ domestic and cosy in a way Grantaire hasn't experienced since fuck knows when. It's fun, joining in on the gentle mockery that gets turned on almost everyone in turn, the kind of mean that you can only be to really, really good friends, ones you've known since forever. 

When Enjolras finally arrives, dinner's long over. 

Grantaire's sitting on the floor at the coffee table with the kids, helping them paint. Marius had tried to help, but been distracted by Bossuet; Grantaire had unkindly chalked his sudden interest in helping Isabel with her purple trees and unnatural flowers and crooked smiley faces to a similar desire to escape the adult circle of conversation, and therefore Éponine. 

He was unfair, probably, because Marius casts them looks from the edge of the room, and they're not the furtive looks of a man searching for an escape, they're wistful. Marius isn't very good with children, but he clearly wants to be.

“Hello,” Enjolras says from the doorway, his voice cutting through the furor with its perfect precise tenor. Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and Bahorel recite his next sentence along with him: “Sorry I'm late –”

“We _know,_ ” Courfeyrac adds, “you were working,” and Enjolras sounds slightly chastened when he speaks again.

“I wish you wouldn't do that.”

“I wish you'd remember that we set dinner times for a reason,” Joly says, peevish.

Grantaire lets himself look up, to capture the look on Enjolras's face, add it to his collection as a curiosity – Enjolras had never been even slightly apologetic about being late to anything he deemed unimportant in college, but things have evidently changed – and promptly chokes on his own tongue.

Enjolras isn't naked, or anything near to naked, so the sight of him shouldn't hit Grantaire as hard as it does – but it _does_. He's only seen this new, grown-up Enjolras in suits, neat and anonymising, and seeing him in jeans and a sweater is as suddenly scandalous as a Victorian gentleman catching a glimpse of a lady's ankle. 

“Uncle Enj'ras!” Isabel shouts happily – they're shouty children, these kids – and Enjolras glances their way and smiles at her. It's a strange smile on his face, warm and sweet and unguarded, and it matches the clothes.

Grantaire's never seen anything like it, except maybe once – when he'd made his case for Enjolras giving him real work to do for the cause, had convinced him to let Grantaire take over some of his crushing responsibility. He'd _promised_ that he could manage it, sworn it up and down and sideways. Promised it didn't matter what Grantaire himself believed, as long as he believed in Enjolras. He'd made his case with coaxing kisses to Enjolras's ear and throat and collarbone, down his sternum and sideways to his nipple, back down the cleave of his ribcage and the flat of his stomach, teased along the curve of his hip. “Let me,” he'd said, and he'd meant more than just sex, and Enjolras hadn't believed him or agreed until Grantaire had stopped teasing and turned serious, made his plea in simple, solid words. 

Something had altered in his face, some slight reserve melting, and there'd been something in his eyes that Grantaire had convinced himself was a hint of new respect. And then he'd given Grantaire that same surprised, sudden smile.

Enjolras's eyes shift from Isabel's dark head to Grantaire, with Gabe in his lap, and it fades to something much more restrained and polite. Gabe is a happy little savage and ignores Enjolras completely, engrossed in pressing his hands into the paint and smearing them on the paper, on himself, on Grantaire. 

Enjolras nods at them, without particular emphasis, and turns back to the others.

-

Grantaire's washing the paint off his hands in the bathroom when the door clicks open behind him. It's a very faint noise, and anyone else might have missed it; Grantaire's always on edge in bathrooms, though, so he looks up to meet Joly's eyes in the mirror. 

“You've been avoiding me,” Joly says. His eyes are steady and concerned, and Grantaire drops his. 

“Not on purpose,” he says. It's a lie. He turns off the faucet and starts drying his hands very thoroughly. His shirt is still covered in the starfish-shaped handprints of Joly's (Bossuet's?) offspring, but there's not much point doing anything with it right now. It can join his collection of stained painting shirts if the washable kid-safe paint doesn't come off, if he ever paints properly again.

“I don't want you to avoid me, R,” Joly says softly, leaning against the doorframe. “It doesn't have to be awkward. I just want to know that you're okay.”

Grantaire shrugs, still drying his hands. “I'm fine, Joly. You worry too much, you know that?"

“We heard – I hear that Enjolras has been difficult – I needed to check.”

“Does _no one_ in this fucked-up little coterie have any sense of privacy?” Grantaire demands, turning.

Like Jehan, Joly's not as easily cowed as he used to be, so he doesn't wilt back at Grantaire's sudden change in tone. He blinks, but his voice stays soothing. “You've been missed. Of course we worry.”

“ _Don't_ ,” Grantaire says, and doesn't look at him when he brushes past on his way out.

-

He has good reasons for hating bathrooms. Bathrooms and Joly together trigger the worst of associations, and it's all Grantaire can do once he's back in the increasingly claustrophobic bosom of the _amis de l'ABC_ \- _god_ , they'd all been pretentious in college - to mutter his goodbyes and head for the door. 

Enjolras looks up from his conversation with Éponine, frowning, but it's Combeferre who rises and gathers his things, Combeferre who makes their excuses and smooths things over like silk.

“Can't I get _five_ minutes to myself without being followed?” Grantaire snaps over his shoulder as he stalks along the pavement.

“Did you forget that I drove us here? Also, that I have the house keys,” Combeferre points out reasonably. Grantaire wants to tell him to fuck himself with his precious keys, but controls the urge. He shrugs, and they walk in silence to the car, and drive mostly in silence.

He's checking into another hotel tomorrow. He can't take being watched like this any longer. He tells Combeferre this when he catches him glancing sideways at him, car stopped at the lights. “Not that you'll miss me,” he adds, with a little laugh that's meant to make it seem light-hearted. It comes out jagged and bitter despite himself. “Not exactly the most companionable kind of – fuck, can I smoke?”

Combeferre barely pauses before nodding. “Put the window down.” 

It's an extreme allowance – Grantaire's only allowed to smoke outside Combeferre's building, on his fire escape, or the roof – but he takes advantage of it. His hands are shaking again, and he had a beer or two tonight, so it's not any kind of withdrawal. It's pure nerves, and Joly, and memories, and Combeferre's presence isn't helping greatly. 

-

He knows Combeferre was there when Joly broke in to his apartment, but he doesn't remember him; he doesn't remember much at all from that night. Not the ambulance arriving, or the ride to the hospital. He does remember Joly looking down at him, shaking his shoulders, a brief broken fragment of memory. 

He only remembers Combeferre from the hospital, when he'd been the only visitor. He'd woken up with a raw throat and aching ribs, and Combeferre had been sitting by his bed, reading. Grantaire had made some tiny, broken noise, and Combeferre had looked up. He hadn't smiled. He'd helped him to drink, and checked the monitor clamped to his fingertip, and then he'd looked at Grantaire over his glasses, stern and scared in a way Grantaire hadn't really seen him before. 

“You were very lucky,” he'd said. “Hypothermia cools the cells in the human body, and that slows their metabolism. The decreased metabolism lets them live longer with little or no oxygen supply, and that increases the odds of survival. It's one of the tricks they use for bypass surgery – I observed one, once. They pack ice around the heart while they're working in the thoracic cavity, and when they're done they can force it to start pumping again. If it wasn't winter, if you hadn't been sitting in the water for so long – with hypothermia, you're not dead until you're _warm_ and dead.”

Grantaire made a noise of protest low in his throat, and Combeferre had helped him to drink again, and then sat back. He'd taken off his glasses and polished them on the hem of his shirt.

“Don't talk,” he said. “Let me. Are you upset it didn't work? Because I'm not sorry we helped you. Unconsciousness always implies consent in medical extremity.” Grantaire had shaken his head, and something starched and stark had lifted from Combeferre's face, and he'd stopped talking like a medical textbook. “Okay. That's good. That's very good, Grantaire.”

“Wasn't _trying ___,” Grantaire had managed to force out. He'd been pretty sure he hadn't been, anyway. It wasn't like – there'd been other options right there in the bathroom, if he'd been serious about it.

He'd just wanted to get away for a while, after the ghastly horror of turning up to Courfeyrac's “Guess who didn't fail their first semester of law school!” party at Joly's. He'd been mostly out of the general loop with his old friends at that point, a year and a bit after the protests had finally been crushed out like the end of a cigarette under a boot heel. He'd avoided group meetings and get-togethers, but he hadn't realised yet that that the only way forward was complete, surgical incision of them all from his life: he'd still tried to keep up with Courfeyrac, Bossuet, a few others. 

Going to the party had been a bad idea. He'd known that beforehand and shown up anyway, full of bravado and cheap wine, already unravelling at the seams and only unravelling faster and faster as the night wore on. Enjolras had looked right through him, so Grantaire had drunk more, and then it had all gotten rather hazy – he remembers the first bathroom, though, going through Joly's cabinets for the innumerable bottles of innumerable pills he always had. He even remembers the second bathroom, the little cramped one in his own flat; he remembers locking the door and running a bath, and drinking some more. He'd only wanted to pass out and make it stop for a while, and it was getting harder and harder to do that fast with just alcohol. He knows from reconstruction that he'd sat in the bath for hours and hours, until the morning, too cold to move and drifting in and out of consciousness. He knows that Joly and Combeferre had broken in, prompted by the mess he'd left behind at Joly's, but he doesn't remember that part, and he's really fucking glad not to.

“Okay,” Combeferre had repeated, expression lightening further. He hadn't sounded like he completely believed him, but he'd definitely wanted to. “That's really, really good, R. The others have been waiting to see you. Do you feel up to seeing anyone now?” Grantaire had shaken his head. “Later, perhaps.”

A fiercer shake. “Tell them to stay away,” Grantaire had managed to grit out in his ruined voice, because if silence could be construed as consent, Combeferre would absolutely exploit any loophole he left him. Combeferre had accepted that, or seemed to, and Grantaire had been blessedly free of visitors until he'd been released early. He'd broken his bond and used the last of his student loan money to leave town, and he'd never planned on coming back.

Combeferre had already switched into pre-law from pre-med at that point, so Grantaire doesn't blame himself or his stint in hospital for his change in career direction; the protests had done that, and the arrests afterwards. 

Grantaire can imagine Combeferre approaching the problem logically, and deciding that he would never end up in a similar position again – coming to the conclusion that like Courfeyrac and Enjolras, society and his future were best served by arming himself with full legal artillery. Combeferre is still a physician and a scientist at heart and in his impulses. Switching to law was one of those, necessary triage; address the bleeding before moving on to more cosmetic repairs. If society was best served by bending his efforts in that direction, bend them he would. 

The law is not about logic, but definition and precedence. The winning counsel is always the one who convinces judge or jury that their understanding or citations are more correct or applicable than the opposing counsel. The attorney may implement logical fallacy, appeal to pathos and ethos, but logos rarely comes into play. 

They make a perfect triumvirate, considered like that. Logos, represented by Combeferre; Pathos, Courfeyrac, excellent at twisting juries' emotions until they're putty in his hands, at brokering settlements and charming opposing counsel, at playing _advocatus diaboli_ until everyone's wound in circles and around his finger. Ethos: Enjolras, always, with his moral backbone like an iron corset, born to argue and batter and to sudden bursts of passion, tireless in pursuit or defence when working towards a greater good. Rigorous in judgment, when others fall below his standards.

-

“I'm sorry about Joly,” Combeferre says into the silence and the growing nicotine haze. “He just – he worries.”

“Tell him to go back to worrying about himself, and to leave me alone,” Grantaire snaps waspishly. It occurs to him to wonder how Joly's doing with parenthood, with an increased biological empire to fret about; how the fuck did he handle Musichetta's pregnancies or the births or their infancies, given all the possible things that could go wrong, that he'd have known only too well? Someone must have been slipping him Valium for the duration. He smiles a little at the thought, and then sighs in a long breath of smoke. “Shit. Okay, I was rude. To him, to you–”

“I've told you before that I'm used to working with Enjolras,” Combeferre says, and Grantaire smiles unwillingly again, bigger. 

“You're dead if he ever hears you say that.”

“I'm always happy to tell Enjolras when he's being particularly thoughtless,” Combeferre says judiciously. “Sometimes he needs it pointed out. You, on the other hand, tend to come to that conclusion on your own, but usually in poor time. Watching the two of you battle is particularly unrewarding.”

“Blind leading the blind?” Grantaire suggests, flippant, and decides he doesn't like where this conversation might be going. They're almost back in the city: maybe he can shut it down. “You can tell everyone to stop treating me with kid gloves, if you want. Tell Joly, anyway.”

“You can't blame them for worrying,” Combeferre says, and fuck, there's no way Grantaire's getting out of the lecture. “The last time you fell out with Enjolras – we didn't see you again for over a decade, R.” 

“I'm thirty-five, not twenty-two. Been there, done that, lost my taste for the dramatic.”

Combeferre quirks an eyebrow, and Grantaire smiles reluctantly yet again. 

“ _Mostly_ lost my taste for the dramatic. The point is, I'm not made of glass.” The phrase sparks a faint memory, something in passing that he missed that he should have picked up on – he frowns, trying to pin it, and the memory slips away. 

“Can we speak frankly, then?” Combeferre asks, “Or will you bolt again? I don't want to send you screaming in the opposite direction, but I think – I really think it's time someone did.”

Grantaire doesn't really see any polite way to say _fuck, no, I prefer elisions and half-truths,_ so he nods permission. It wouldn't be true, anyway. He likes straight talk, and the way everyone has been talking around him with cleverly-woven artful artfulness, referencing only safe pieces of the past, trying to wind him in and draw him close again – it's not like he doesn't appreciate the effort, it's not like he doesn't see it, but it's driving him crazy by degrees. He's always been exceptionally good at filling in the gaps in conversation with his own bleak interpolations, and giving him so _much_ room to fill – 

It's probably, actually, a little of the reason he likes Enjolras so much, even when he's angry with him. Enjolras doesn't believe in bullshit, either, although he'd phrase it differently. He doesn't work that way. Grantaire likes knowing exactly where he stands with him, even when that standing is far from good. 

“No one wants to repeat the same old mistakes,” Combeferre says, breaking up Grantaire's meditative smoking. “Given that, I had hoped that we'd all grown up and learned from the past, but it seems – Well. If we're crowding you too closely, I can suggest that we all take a step back, but it's a mistake of my own that everyone's overcorrecting for. When you asked for privacy and space, before, I judged that you needed them. I thought it would be best if I gave you those things, and I kept the others away. Others who very much wanted to see you.” 

“That wasn't a mistake,” Grantaire says slowly. “That was exactly what I wanted.” Others? The way Combeferre says it is weighted with meaning. 

“Yes, well, there wasn't exactly general agreement on that point,” Combeferre says. “Giving you the chance to slip away–”

“I'm sorry if that caused any problems for you.” Combeferre glances away from the road to look at him, and the expression on his face says _you have no idea._ “What was I supposed to do? I wasn't going to hang around to be pitied or ignored some more. It was time I moved the fuck on and stopped clinging to the past.”

“Things might have been different. If you'd stayed.”

“Or they might have stayed exactly the same. Half of the gang barely talking to me, and the other half making a huge and obvious effort to forgive and forget, to ignore the fact that when En- when you all needed me, I failed, I wasn't there – fuck, I'm _not talking_ about this with you, but to _him_ , I stopped existing–”

Combeferre compresses his lips, and Grantaire wonders if he takes that sudden verbal flood as a reproach. Combeferre was one of the ones who'd gone distant after the protests, until the aftermath of Courfeyrac's party – 

“You need to talk to Enjolras about that, not me,” he says finally. “He was angry, yes, for some time, but he was disappointed, too. Enjolras doesn't deal with disappointment well. He's been my best friend for over twenty years, so I can tell you – I shouldn't, but I will – that he had a very good model for that in his own parents. An insight would probably horrify him, if I ever shared it with him.” He shrugs. “He would have dealt with it, eventually. Looking back, I think I should have let him see you, but I thought, once you were less fragile – You weren't supposed to leave.”

“I'm sorry for not realizing there was a master plan,” Grantaire snaps. Then he bites his lip; he'd given Combeferre permission to talk bluntly, so he has no excuse for prickling. He'd asked for it. “Sorry, I'm trying to be better about the snapping.”

“I'm trying to be less – to orchestrate less,” Combeferre says, a truth for a truth. “It may have been a bad idea to have assigned your case to Enjolras in the first place. You both asked me not to. But I thought if you could establish even a working relationship it might help correct my original mistake. You'd be more likely to stay in contact with all of us if you could at least bear each other's presence, but I seem to have made things worse.”

Grantaire makes a considering noise. The faint music on the radio and the soft rattle-hum of the road against the tires fill in the spaces while he stays silent, and Combeferre doesn't say anything more.

Combeferre _has_ been Enjolras's best friend for over twenty years; there's not a person in the world Enjolras trusts more or who knows him better. Certain limits notwithstanding – there are things about Enjolras that Grantaire knows, that Combeferre can't know – if Combeferre says something about Enjolras, it can be taken all the way to the bank. Combeferre is the person Enjolras trusts to act as his compass, one of the few people he lets dictate to him on anything.

Grantaire doesn't think he asked Combeferre to say any of this; that's not how Enjolras works. It's something Combeferre decided needed to be said. 

“I'm still really fucking angry with him,” he says. It's actually kind of a relief to realise that, after the drinking and self-blame followed by the frozen politeness. “I know I probably don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, but it wasn't _fair_. To decide I was a junkie, after – one minute things were okay, and the next–”

Combeferre simply shrugs, takes a corner – almost there – and doesn't say anything more. The oracle has spoken and now shut up shop, evidently. 

He's given Grantaire things to think about, though. _Enjolras doesn't deal with disappointment well._ And, _others who wanted very much to see you_ , others who Combeferre kept at bay, who were furious with him when Grantaire skipped town. Others, meaning?


End file.
